Uk politics

Wednesday

Lawrence Kay

Politicking on the backs of the poorest

This afternoon Jim Knight MP, the minister for welfare reform, proclaimed that the Government wants to turn the Jobcentre Plus network into a careers service for everyone. He said that welfare advisers, who currently try to help get people on benefits back into work, will start to “provide opportunities for progression” for anyone in a job – no matter whether the person is a banker or a bin man. This is a bad idea for a simple reason: it is far more important to help the unemployed back into work than give assistance to people who already have a job. The longer that someone is out of work, the worse

Peter Hoskin

Graph of the day

Here’s a neat little graph from PoliticsHome, which plots the three main parties’ opinion poll ratings alongside their “party morale rating” from the PHI100 tracker.  As PolHome put it, it kind of tells us what we know already: that party morale more or less correlates with poll position.  But, given how so many politicians deny that they’re fussed about polls, it’s still good to see it in black and white:

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Etonians and Bolsheviks

A terrific PMQs today. This exchange had it all. Noise, laughter, rhetoric, anger, humiliation, jokes, and dramatic swings in the balance of advantage. We even had a sighting of that great Westminster rarity – a fact.  Cameron’s first question elicited simple information. Would our troops start returning from Afghanistan in 2010 or 2011? Brown didn’t quite answer it but said that by 2011 the combined forces, including Afghans, would number 300,000, by which point the military burden ‘will start to change’. Cameron clarified. ‘That sounds more like 2011.’ Brown didn’t demur.   Turning to the economy Cameron asked why Britain is the last G20 country to come out of recession.Brown:

Peter Hoskin

A PMQs to damage Brown?

A quick tour around the political blogoshpere, and it seems everyone is saying Brown came out on top in today’s PMQs.  For what it’s worth, I’d agree with them – but only to a point.  On the one hand, Cameron was unusually clumsy, which allowed Brown to land some pretty decent blows.  But, on the other, I suspect some of those blows won’t play well on TV later.  And, let’s not forget, the entire point of PMQs, from the leaders’ perspectives, is to score some coverage on the Ten ‘O’ Clock News.   It all depends on what the broadcasters pick up on.  If it’s Brown’s gag that the Tories’

David Blackburn

Diplomacy in action

It’s obviously excellent news that the five British sailors incarcerated by Iran on Monday night have been released without incident. Exacerbating already strained diplomatic tensions would have been an enormous temptation to the Iranian regime and David Miliband is right to commend their “professional” conduct in this matter. Miliband said:  “The Iranian authorities gave us every indication that they wanted to deal with this in a straightforward, consular way. It was never a political matter and I welcome the fact they have dealt with it in this professional way.” The Foreign Secretary added, “it proves that diplomacy can work”. Well yes, but there is a world of difference between Iran

David Blackburn

This small man thinks he’s St. Joan

I sympathise with Alistair Darling and his defence of the City. When he’s not contending with Gordon Brown’s suicidal Tobin tax proposals, Darling has to confront Nicolas Sarkozy’s calculated anti-Anglo popular politics. Yesterday, the Elysees’s Puss-in-Boots delivered a deliberately provocative and economically senseless attack on what he described as the “unconstrained Anglo-Saxon market model.” Sarkozy sees the appointment of Michel Barnier as EU financial regulation supremo as a “victory” for France; he expressed himself in those exact terms: “Do you know what it means for me to see for the first time in 50 years a French European commissioner in charge of the internal market, including financial services, including the

Tuesday

James Forsyth

Testing times for the Tories

The opinion polls are continuing to feed the story that the Tories are in trouble. Tonight’s Politics Home data which shows Cameron’s personal ratings dropping 15 points in the last 10 weeks follows a string of polls where the Tories have failed to break through the forty percent mark. Tory morale has been a bit shaken by these polls; Cameron could do with a decisive win at PMQs tomorrow to gee up the Parliamentary party. But turning these numbers around is, I suspect, going to require some policies that show us what David Cameron’s irreducible core is. Oddly enough, I don’t think these policies have to be particularly popular but

David Blackburn

Love and marriage

It’s all a bit of a puzzle. How will David Cameron incentivise marriage? In an interview with the Mail, Cameron dismisses IDS’s transferable tax allowance scheme. “It would be wrong to say that they are Conservative Party proposals.”                      Considering the scheme will cost £4.9bn, the pro-cuts Tories can ill-afford an incentive that would benefit the middle class in the immediate term. Cameron and Osborne are searching for a cheaper way to honour the pledge. Pete and Fraser debated whether marriage should and could be financially incentivised. On balance I side with Pete, marriage should not be financially incentivised. I’ve nothing to add to Pete’s analysis except that I

David Blackburn

The case for NHS reform

Britain remains the sick man of Europe. Professor Sir Mike Richards’s report finds that although progress has been made on cancer treatments, diagnosis rates, and therefore the chances of survival, lag behind European standards. A deluge of statistical analysis supports Richards’s findings. The European Journal of Cancer’s recent research into solid cancers, such as breast cancer and melanoma, demonstrated that the speed of diagnosis and survival rates in the UK were “20% below” the European average. Additionally, the table below, which is taken from 2009’s OECD health data, illustrates that the gap between the number of cancer deaths per 100,000 population in Europe and the UK has widened.   1997

Peter Hoskin

Burnham enters the fray

Oh dear.  The Labour leadership speculation is back in full effect, thanks to Paul Waugh’s scoop in the Standard.  According to Paul, Andy Burnham is “prepared to throw his hat into the ring” to succeed Gordon Brown, should it all go wrong for Labour in the next election.  Apparently, he’s even lined up Tessa Jowell as his campaign manager – although, naturally, the Health Minister is downplaying the claims. One thing’s for sure: this story is badly timed for Labour – with their recent progress in the polls – and Brown could well do without another bout of leadership wrangling to undermine his premiership.  But what about Burnham – has

Peter Hoskin

The good and/or bad news for the Tories is that there hasn’t been a Brown Bounce

If you’re still scratching your head over the latest opinion polls, then I’d recommend you read Anthony Wells’ latest post over at UK Polling report.  In it, he outlines four potential reasons for the diminishing gap between the Tories and Labour: Cameron’s “reverse” over the Lisbon Treaty; increased economic optimism; Labour performing better; and the absence of positive feeling towards the Tories.  To my mind, it’s probably a case of “all of the above,” to varying degrees – but, as Anthony concludes, “we can’t tell for sure.” One further point that’s worth making is that the reduced gap between the parties isn’t due to a “Brown bounce”.  After all –

Peter Hoskin

Paranoia rather than camaraderie

Another one for the Brown as Nixon folder, courtesy of Rachel Sylvester’s column today: “‘It’s about style of government,’ says one senior figure due to give evidence [to the Iraq Inquiry]. ‘Blair would have a war Cabinet, but a small caucus would meet beforehand. The civil servants were frustrated. Gordon is just as bad. He gives lots of time to Peter Mandelson and Shriti Vadera and ignores the officials. There’s a darker side to the Brown machine — he’s more suspicious. It’s cliquiness driven by paranoia rather than camaraderie, but it has the same result.'”

Peter Hoskin

The clock is ticking on Iran

When I visited Israel last year, various sources there were convinced – adamant, even – that Iran was within a year or two of creating an atomic bomb.  That may or may not have been the case, but it’s still ominous that that hypothetical timeline is nearly up.  We can all too easily forget that, in the background to all the column inches and comment pieces expended on Iran, there are genuine and pressing concerns that the country is on the cusp of becoming a nuclear power. Which is why the two latest news stories from the country are particularly worrying: the capture of a racing yacht by the Iranian

Monday

James Forsyth

The Tories need a more positive message

The Lib Dem’s policy to make everyone’s first 10 thousand pounds of income tax free is, whatever its imperfections, a significant doorstep offer. By that, I mean it is something that those canvassing for the Lib Dems can say in an attmept to get the voters to listen to them rather than shut the door in their face. This is something the Tories are short of. At the moment, the Tories have a bunch of smaller policies — abolishing HIPS, freezing council tax, only millionaires paying inheritance tax — that by all acounts go down well on the doorstep. But they lack a big policy that defines the party to

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The odds on independence

Whenever a London bookmaker made odds on Scottish politics, my former colleagues at The Scotsman used to make easy money*. The world of Holyrood, where yours truly served a one year tour of duty, has its own political weather system that it’s hard to understand from a distance – so likelihoods are given very high odds. But today Ladbrokes gives odds that I think are pretty fair: 20-1 on independence before 2015. The SNP’s rout in Glasgow North West a fortnight ago is part of a wider reluctance to separate from England. The financial crisis, and the way that RBS somehow became the new Darien Scheme, has spooked everyone. Salmond

Peter Hoskin

The doubts that remain after Brown’s Afghanistan statement

So there we have it.  Gordon Brown has confirmed what we all expected: that 500 more British troops will be sent to Afghanistan, bringing the total UK presence up to around 10,000.  The “surge” will be rounded off when Obama announces something like 35,000 extra US troops tomorrow. Although greater manpower is A Good Thing for the mission in Afghanistan – and the mission in Afghanistan is certainly an important one – I can’t help but have some qualms about the twin UK and US announcements.   For starters, there’s the simple issue of numbers.  500 more UK troops and 35,000 more US troops falls short of the bar of

Mark Bathgate

Labour’s free for all

The potentially huge exposure of UK banks in Dubai, depreciating some UK bank share prices again this morning, is a reminder of just how much UK bank lending grew in recent years. The above chart shows the growth in external claims of the UK owned banks around the world over the past decade. The sums lent almost quadrupled to nearly $4 trillion in 8 years.  Anyone interested in discovering which bubbles the UK banks (and now taxpayers) have funded can find the data on the Bank of England website – $1.2 trillion in the United States, $125 billion in Spain, $183 billion in Ireland, $50 billion to the UAE/Dubai. Bank

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Tory corporation tax plans become clearer

During the Tory party conference, I wrote about how the Tories were developing plans to radically cut corporation tax. In recent weeks, the Tories have been dropping plenty of hints about this agenda but giving little detail on it. After reiterating the Tories’ existing plans to lower the rates of corporation tax at the CBI conference last week, David Cameron said: “and we want to go further.” Today, in an interview with the FT, the Tory treasurer Michael Spencer reveals that he is “hopeful that, over the next parliament…we will get corporation tax down towards the 20 per cent level.” Spencer is close enough to the leadership to know what

Peter Hoskin

Will Darling’s politicking make the Tories weaken their IHT pledge?

Ok, so the Age of Austerity means that promises made in sunnier times will need to be forestalled – or even cancelled altogether.  But it’s still revealing that Labour are thinking about reversing their plan to raise the threshold at which inheritance tax is levied. After all, this is what Brown regards as The Great Dividing Line: the Tories implementing a tax cut for their “rich friends,” on the one side, and Labour implementing policies “for the many,” on the other.  Darling’s decision to raise the IHT threshold to £350,000 for single people and £700,000 for married couples undermined that crude message.  Reversing the policy may, in Labour strategists’ eyes,

David Blackburn

The return of the Mansion tax

The Liberal Democrats unveil their tax plans later today, and Nick Clegg insists that his radical plan will “put fairness back into the tax system”. It is expected to be a left of centre plan: don’t expect to hear anything about “savage cuts”. The Mansion Tax is back, albeit in slightly more expensive clothes. The original proposal levied a 0.5% charge on properties valued at over £1million, which was a determined effort at suicide. Following criticism from senior MPs, staring nervously at their irate constituents, Clegg and Cable have raised the threshold to £2million and the levy to 1% – a humiliating retreat, revealing the dangers of making policy on