Uk politics

Tuesday

James Forsyth

Fred shredded down to size

The removal of Fred Goodwin’s knighthood serves the coalition’s political purposes. It shows them being tough on a bad banker and reminds everyone that these problems happened on the last government’s watch and that Alex Salmond was cheering on RBS’s bid for ABN Amro. There are even some in government who are up for a fight over clawing back part of his pension or past bonuses believing it would put both Goodwin and the human rights act in the dock. This is not to say that the removal of his knighthood was not merited. Goodwin didn’t do much of a service to banking, after all. There’s another lesson in this:

Peter Hoskin

<del>Sir</del> Fred Goodwin

And so Fred Goodwin has lost his knighthood. Here’s the Cabinet Office statement (and some of my previous thoughts here): ‘It will soon be announced in the London Gazette that the Knighthood conferred upon Fred Goodwin as a Knight Bachelor has been cancelled and annulled. This decision, not normally publicised in advance, was taken on the advice of the Forfeiture Committee, which advised that Fred Goodwin had brought the honours system in to disrepute. The scale and severity of the impact of his actions as CEO of RBS made this an exceptional case. In 2008 the Government had to provide £20bn of new equity to recapitalise RBS and ensure its

Peter Hoskin

Cameron cheered by the Lib Dems, spared by the Tories, mocked by Labour

If you wanted proof that Cameron has softened his stance towards Europe since the hard chill of December, then just look to the Lib Dems. Nick Clegg, unlike then, was sat next to the Prime Minister as he gave his statement to the Commons this afternoon. And the questions that followed from the likes of Menzies Campbell and Simon Hughes were generally warm and approving. Campbell started by, in his words, ‘praising the pragmatism of the PM’. Hughes celebrated a ‘more successful and satisfactory summit than the one in December’. That praise, while friendly enough, creates obvious problems for Cameron — and it was those problems that Ed Miliband sought

Daniel Korski

Moving on up

If Muhammad won’t come to the mountain, the mountain must come to Muhammad. Or so goes a saying popularised by Francis Bacon. It seems Andrew Mitchell, the Development Secretary, has taken this to heart and decided to move his entire Department — DfID — closer to the Foreign Office, MoD and, of course, No 10. After years of relishing its location — both geographically and functionally — a distance away from Whitehall, where all the other government departments are located, DfID will, I’m told, move to 22-26 Whitehall, next to Horse Guard’s Parade. The key point is the cost saving involved — at the moment DfID’s current building at 1 Palace St

Jonathan Jones

The Tories are extending their lead on the economy

It looks like Dave’s still made of Teflon. Even after the economy shrank by 0.2 per cent and the unemployment rate rose to its highest point since 1995, the public still think his party is better at handling the economy than Labour. And the Tories’ lead on what is by far the most important issue to voters hasn’t just survived all this bad economic news — it’s actually grown. Before Christmas, 31 per cent said the Tories would best handle the economy, against 27 per cent for Labour. In today’s YouGov poll, that four point lead has trebled to become a 12 point lead — the biggest since autumn 2010:

Jonathan Jones

A poll to darken Salmond’s day

It looks like Fraser was right to question Vision Critical’s recent Scottish independence poll. That poll surveyed just 180 Scots and found 51 per cent saying they would vote ‘Yes’ to Alex Salmond’s referendum question – ‘Do you agree that Scotland should be an independent country?’ – and just 39 per cent saying ‘No’. Today, Ipsos MORI has released a somewhat more reliable poll, sampling 1,005 Scots. It finds 50 per cent saying they’d vote ‘No’ and just 37 saying ‘Yes’. So, it looks like even if the referendum asks Salmond’s leading question, the Nationalists are likely to be defeated. And while the SNP may try to claim that 37 per cent

Peter Hoskin

Miliband the eurosceptic? Not yet

Ed Miliband is not naturally a eurospectic, but he certainly sounded like one during his appearance on ITV’s Daybreak show earlier. ‘I’m very concerned about what David Cameron has done,’ he said in reference to the PM’s equivocation over Europe yesterday. ‘He’s sold us down the river.’ Whether this is Miliband committing towards the sort of euroscepticism that is being urged on him by some of his colleagues, it’s too early to say. It’s only words, after all. But my guess is that — just as when Miliband attacked Cameron for not signing up to the latest treaty, but couldn’t say whether he’d have signed it himself — this is

Monday

James Forsyth

Modernisation 2.0

One of the flaws of Tory modernisation was that it was never interested enough in pounds and pence. Social issues, the environment and public service reform were what the modernisers specialised in, not economics. But tonight’s Macmillan lecture by Nick Boles, one of the most intellectually influential modernisers, is devoted to the subject of how Britain’s global competiveness in the global economy can be improved. His argument is that: ‘What really threatens the general wellbeing of the British people is the stalling of productivity growth and the certainty that the next 20 years will expose them to competition that is vastly more intense than anything we have ever seen. If

Blair Gibbs

Trigger happy policy

There have been signs recently that ministers are slipping back into the policy-by-headline mindset that defined the last Labour government. We’re seeing the sorts of policies that lack evidence, are launched without any detail on timetables or implementation, and are usually geared around an initiative — if possible, a pilot or a local trial that is short-lived and guaranteed not to alter very much. Today the Home Office brought us a classic of the kind: the ‘community trigger’ to address anti-social behaviour. The Home Secretary’s motivation is sincere, but the method — devised by her officials — is deeply flawed. With what detail we have, we know that it will be piloted

Peter Hoskin

Cameron softens his stance on Europe — but who benefits?

‘We will insist that the EU institutions — the court, the commission — that they work for all 27 nations of the EU.’ So said David Cameron, back in December, suggesting that he’d block Europe’s ‘fiscal compact’ countries from using EU-wide institutions to enforce their, er, fiscal compact. But now this component of his ‘veto’ appears to have come to naught, and that veto is looking all the thinner for it. On the Today Programme this morning, William Hague confirmed that Britain wouldn’t block the use of EU institutions, such as the court, for the fiscal union. ‘We’re not intending to take action about that now,’ is how he put

Jonathan Jones

The tuition fee effect, revealed

The coalition’s tuition fee rise will put young people from poor backgrounds off applying to university — or so we were told by Labour and the National Union of Students. But now we can actually put that claim to the test. UCAS today revealed how many of that first year group to be affected by the rise have applied to university. So what does those number tell us? Looking at the headlines resulting from the release, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Team Miliband have been vindicated. ‘University applications plunge 9% after tuition fees are trebled,’ proclaims the Daily Mail. ‘Thousands give up on university because of tuition fees,’ says

Jonathan Jones

Some numbers to encourage both halves of the coalition

Yesterday’s YouGov poll for the Sunday Times had a few interesting nuggets buried beneath the top line (Lab 40, Con 39, as it happens). Here are some of the most topical findings: 1) Clegg’s tax proposals are very popular. 83 per cent support the Lib Dems’ policy of increasing the personal allowance to £10,000. This might explain the 12-point jump in Nick Clegg’s net approval rating since last week. And there’s strong support for the ‘mansion tax’ that Vince Cable’s been pushing since 2009. 66 per cent back ‘a new tax upon people with houses worth more than £2 million’ — something Clegg called for again last week — and

Sunday

James Forsyth

Peston: Hester will not take bonus

Stephen Hester’s decision to waive his bonus, revealed by Robert Peston just after 10 o’clock, will be a source of great relief to David Cameron and George Osborne. A story that could have dragged on for weeks, undermining their argument about fairness has just lost most of its potency. Ed Miliband, though, will be able to claim — with some justification — that it was the threat of a Commons vote on the matter that led to Hester renouncing his bonus. But this isn’t quite the end of this business. There’s now the question of what happens to the bonuses for other members of staff at RBS and then there

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Labour seizes on Hester’s bonus

The issue of Stephen Hester’s bonus is going to carry on hurting the government. Labour has now announced that it will use an opposition day debate on 7 February to hold a parliamentary vote on the issue. The coalition will either have to lose, an admittedly non-binding vote, or whip its MPs to go through the lobbies in defence of Hester’s bonus. As Labour showed when it used the threat of a Commons vote to push Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp to abandon its bid for full control of BSkyB, the bully pulpit of Parliament can be extremely effective. These votes also bring out tensions within the two coalition parties. I

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

A skewed response to a skewed question

‘A clear majority of people in Scotland now back independence, according to an exclusive poll for the Sunday Express. Using Alex Salmond’s preferred referendum question, the Vision Critical survey found 51 per cent would vote ‘yes’ with 39 per cent against. If such a dramatic result were repeated in the autumn of 2014, the First Minister would have an absolute mandate to negotiate an end to the Union with England.’ So runs the story. CoffeeHousers may have spotted two of the snags: the poll uses Salmond’s laughably loaded question, and seems to have been conducted by a chain of opticians. Further inspection gives a sample size of around 2,000 people,

Peter Hoskin

The government’s Hester problem intensifies

First there was Fred Goodwin, now there’s Stephen Hester. The chief executive of RBS is fast becoming the bête noire of the British banking system, thanks to his roughly £1 million share bonus which, we learn in the Sunday Times (£) this morning, may be topped up with an extra £8 million over the next few years. Little wonder that Iain Duncan Smith admitted on the Marr show earlier that there may be a severe public backlash, and that the government could suffer from it. He suggested that it would be better, for all concerned, were Hester just to forego the million. It’s one of those debates where it’s easy

Saturday

James Forsyth

Alexander identifies Labour’s problem

Douglas Alexander may sometimes hide the meaning of what he says under a layer of jargon but he remains one of the more interesting political strategists on the Labour side. Alexander, a Brown long-marcher turned Blairite, saw before many of his colleagues the need for Labour to level with the public on cuts. He privately thought that Gordon Brown’s attempt to fight the last election on a reprise of the investment versus cuts strategy of ’01 and ’05 was a mistake. So, it is no surprise that Alexander, now shadow Foreign Secretary, is trying to use the opportunity created by Ed Balls’ acceptance of the need for a public sector

Peter Hoskin

Miliband hopes to put a cap on his welfare policy problems

A-ha! Labour have hit on a line on the benefits cap, and Liam Byrne is peddling it in the Daily Telegraph this morning. ‘Now, there are some people who are against this idea altogether,’ he writes, ‘Neither I, nor Ed Miliband are among them.’ The way he sees it, he goes on to explain, is that there should be a cap but it should be set locally, so that it could be higher than £26,000 in more expensive areas such as London, and potentially less in other areas. Bryne adds that there should be an ‘an independent body like the Low Pay Commission to determine the level at which it

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

My week in Westminster

I’m presenting Radio Four’s Week in Westminster this morning, on deficit wars, London wars, welfare wars, and another set of wars which no one has really discussed yet: the directly-elected police commissioners. There will be about 40 of them elected in November, and candidates are already emerging: Nick Ross (ex-Crimewatch), Colonel Tim Collins and London mayoral hopeful Brian Paddick. I interview two names that have been thrown into the frame, both former ministers and both women: Jane Kennedy (Labour) and Ann Widdecombe (Tory). I wanted to find out just how excited we should be about these elected police commissioners. The theory is very simple: that right now, England’s constabularies report to the Home

Friday

Fraser Nelson

Osborne needs to come up with radical growth policies, and soon

When it comes to defending the free market, and making the case for fiscal sanity, there’s scarcely anyone better than David Cameron. He was on superb form in Davos yesterday, giving much-needed blunt advice to the continentals. ‘Eurozone countries must do everything possible to get to grips with their own debts,’ he said. And he’s right. The snag, as I say in my Daily Telegraph column today, is that Cameron’s definition of getting to grips with debt involves increasing it more than Labour planned to, more than France, Germany, Italy or Portugal. On the first sign of trouble, his government gave up on its deficit reduction timetable – it will now