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Posts Tagged ‘David Cameron’

The Tory party: idealists welcome

21/05/2012, 01:30:53 PM

by Kevin Meagher

For JS Mill, the Tories were famously the stupid party. By the 1980s they were definitely the ideological party. But under David Cameron are they are becoming something else: the home for political idealists?

We casually think of idealism as the preserve of the Left, but the lodestar of this government is to reshape the state in as profound a way as Attlee or Thatcher managed.

From the NHS reforms to free schools. From academies to police commissioners. From the big society to big city mayors. Austerity cuts through to the massive welfare shake-ups; there is an abundance of idealism. Or ‘tip-up-the-apple-cart-ism.’

Much of it is to be regretted of course; a lot of it feels impractical, even reckless, but idealism it most definitely is. As is George Osborne’s “faith based” economic policy. In the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, he presses on.

It’s like watching one of those old bits of film of a man flapping giant cardboard wings and jumping off a pier, expecting to fly. The chancellor is the ultimate expression of optimism over reason.

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David Cameron lied to the House of Commons about Andy Coulson

11/05/2012, 07:00:07 AM

by Atul Hatwal

The reviews for Andy Coulson’s performance at Leveson yesterday might have been glowing, but he did reveal one critical fact. A fact with no caveat or wriggle room.

It came during the passage of questioning on Coulson’s vetting. When asked by the lead counsel for the inquiry, Robert Jay QC, whether he had attended meetings of the National Security Council (NSC), Coulson was unusually clear.

“Yes” he said.

There was no “maybe”, “might have” or “I can’t recall.”

It’s important because attendance at full NSC discussions requires the highest level of clearance, developed vetting (DV) so that participants can view content classified as top secret or above. As has been well established, Andy Coulson did not have this clearance.

So what you might say. If Coulson attended a meeting without the right clearance then that’s not ideal, but hardly front page news.

What elevates this from being another example of shoddy internal government process to significance is the identity of the chair of the NSC: the Rt Hon David Cameron MP.

In this context, Cameron’s reported comments to the House of Commons on Wednesday 20^th July 2011 take on a new salience. Responding to questions about Coulson’s security clearance, he stated,

“He was not able to see the most secret documents…It was all done in the proper way“.

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What the Queen’s speech tells us about this dysfunctional government

09/05/2012, 06:37:20 PM

by Atul Hatwal

One thing is clear from this derisory Queen’s speech. Underpinning the paucity of content and the laundry list quality to this rag bag of measures is a central truth: the gangrene of government has well and truly set in.

The most obvious tell-tale sign is the absence of a top-line. If the BBC is calling your programme a “hotch-potch” with “no over-arching theme”, you know something has gone wrong.

The package of 15 bills and 4 draft bills is rare in that there is virtually no truly distinctive or news-worthy initiative. All of the headlines from these proposals will be generated by the politics of their parliamentary passage, notably with Lords reform, rather than the substantive impact of their delivery.

In coming forward with a programme like this the government has ceded the news agenda. It will be pushed and pulled by the rebellion du jour from right-wing Tories or left-wing Lib Dems on a variety of amendments to Dave and Nick’s anodyne bills.

The real question that should be asked about this Queen’s speech is why? Why is there not a single bill that will draw a dividing line between government and opposition? That will draw their side together and focus the debate on a distinction with Labour. How can the coalition party managers in have been so incompetent?

The answer lies not in their political ability or ambition, but the process of government.

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Vive la France, the truth is about to catch-up with Cameron

09/05/2012, 07:00:17 AM

by James Ruddick

The truth is out there, and not even a smooth and accomplished liar like David Cameron can hide it.

The truth is that you pay off more debt through growth than through austerity. It’s a plain fact. History confirms it again and again. Right now, in the US, where Obama snubbed austerity, the economy has not only come out of recession, but is booming, and the creditors, getting bigger and bigger monthly cheques, are swooning with surprise and delight.

Of course you never hear this in the UK media, which is lazy and self-interested and in thrall to the austerity lie of the hard right. You never hear that growth means more tax receipts and less deficits. No reference is ever made to the period after the Second World War when the whole of Europe was broke and in ruins, and yet boomed back within five years on Keynesian growth. Hush hush, that.

But now the lie is about to be exposed because the French people, sometimes a more sophisticated electorate than our own, have junked austerity and voted for growth. Unemployment in France will now fall, tax receipts will rise, consumer demand increase, debt repayments accelerate. It is what always happens. This is a disaster for Cameron and the Tory lie machine. Voters in Britain will see the extent to which their leader has duped them. They will realise that had we kept Labour’s economic recovery of 2009 going we would now have repaid more national debt.

As the truth emerges, we will at least have front row seats. It’s a small consolation but it’s not to be sneered at. We can watch the excruciating pay-off from this particular commedia dell’arte – David Cameron climbing the spiral staircase with the mob trailing behind him. The coalition is already teetering and his backbenchers, knowing the voters are going to sack them at the first opportunity, want his head. He has no answer. He finds himself in waters that are unchartered for him: no one now believes a word he says. There will be an election before long and he will lose. And who can feel sorry for him? He has been discovered secretly poisoning the patient he was supposed to be caring for.

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One example of what’s wrong with British journalism

01/05/2012, 07:30:10 AM

by Peter Goddard

Yesterday’s Guardian featured the ‘shocking’ news that staff on P&O Cruises will not be paid tips directly, but will receive a bonus related to performance.

The headline for this story makes great hay from the staff in question being paid just 75p an hour. Below the line, the audience is outraged, with much Cameron-bashing and righteous left wing scorn denouncing these ‘slave wages’.

But if we actually read the article rather than simply scandalise ourselves with the headline, a more complex story emerges.

The staff in question hail from India and the Philippines, not the UK.

And they work on boats in international waters, not the UK.

So, non-British employees working in a non-British location are paid wages that, by British standards, are very low. This seems rather less scandalous.

Assuming the cruise company provides their staff with room and board (and this is just one of the relevant facts that the article does not provide), the value of the 75p an hour wage bears no relation to the buying power of that money in Europe and therefore tells us very little about how well or badly these workers are being treated.

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Flashman feels the pressure

30/04/2012, 05:30:40 PM

by Sanjay Patel

Red-faced, splenetic and in a corner. That’s where David Cameron finds himself after his Commons performance today.

There’s little doubt, this was the angriest David Cameron has been at the despatch box. That nice, mild mannered, likeable chap who hugged a huskie (or something like that) was nowhere to be seen. As ever when rattled, Cameron gave into his emotion, he channelled it. And as so often when a politician indulges in a response riven with emotion, tipped over into parody.

The Tory MPs might have liked what they heard and bayed for more, but it won’t look like that on the news. The lasting image will be of Flashman hurling invective across the floor of the House, sneering at Dennis Skinner to claim his pension.

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The polling that explains why Ed Miliband is right to lead on Hunt

30/04/2012, 07:00:04 AM

by Atul Hatwal

What’s the best attack on the Tories? For Ed Miliband, the fate of Jeremy Hunt has been the priority, apparently at the expense of highlighting the return of recession.

Commentators from all sides of the left have been critical: most voters already think all politicians are far too close to the media barons. The Hunt affair only confirms this and expending valuable political time on the intricacies of the Ministerial code instead of hammering home Tory failure on the recession totally misses the point.

It’s an understandable view. But wrong.

Jeremy Hunt is small fry. This issue is actually about leadership, David Cameron’s and Ed Miliband’s.

If the Labour leader has a single task to achieve before the next election, he must to narrow the gap with David Cameron on who the voters prefer as prime minister.

To understand the scale of challenge, it’s worth reflecting on a salutary fact: at the last general election on May 3^rd, YouGov surveyed people on their preference for prime minister. Gordon Brown was the choice of 26% with David Cameron on 32%. In the nineteen months of his leadership, across 40 polls, Ed Milband has never bettered Gordon Brown’s dismal benchmark.

Huntgate gives Miliband an opportunity to help change the way that the public looks at him, and David Cameron.

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More than anything else, this government lacks purpose

27/04/2012, 08:00:56 AM

by Pat McFadden

Last week I wrote that competence or the lack of it had become a key problem for the government. A number of issues were responsible, beginning with the unnecessary government provoked petrol crisis and running up to the farcical inability of the home office to add up the number of days in three months when trying to deport Abu Qatada. All of this means that politics is being looked at through a different lens compared with a couple of months ago.

This different context in which the government is no longer getting the benefit of the doubt lies behind the recent shift away from the Conservatives and towards Labour in recent opinion polls.

But this week, something even more serious than government competence came into question. It is the government’s purpose. If the coalition had one purpose it was supposed to be “sorting out” the economy through fiscal austerity. There isn’t a debate or question time that goes by in the House of Commons without some reference to this from government ministers. It’s the glue that holds the Tories and Liberals together – all that stuff about “sorting out Labour’s mess” and “working together in the national interest.”

Except it isn’t working. The economy is back in recession. All those Cameron and Osborne quotes about the economy being out of the danger zone look hopelessly, as the phrase of our times puts it, out of touch.

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David Cameron’s political judgement makes him the real Hunt of this story

25/04/2012, 07:10:40 AM

by Atul Hatwal

Why does Jeremy Hunt still have a job? His holding statement last night was so full of holes it could be used to sieve the peas.

Hunt’s words were carefully chosen, and as ever when politicians’ parse, it is what is not explicitly ruled out that counts: “some of the evidence reported meetings and conversations that simply didn’t happen “.

So, some of the meetings and conversations did happen.

That’s enough. A cursory reading of the e-mails suggests that for Hunt to survive, Frédéric Michel would have had to have been a complete fantasist. Jeremy Hunt has already said he is not.

The depth of trouble in which Hunt finds himself can be gauged by the way the Leveson cache of e-mails is being reported: almost always with a prefix such as “devastating”, in the same way Andrew Lansley is normally “gaffe-prone” or “under pressure”.

Naturally, Jeremy Hunt thinks he can ride out the storm. After spending the best part of the past two decades scrambling to climb the greasy political pole (so to speak), he and his advisers will desperately be looking for a way through the minefield. It’s an understandable human reaction.

But what makes less sense is the response from Number 10.

Quite apart from the substance of the issue and the appalling privileged influence that the Murdochs clearly enjoyed, there is something potentially even more damaging in the Downing street reaction, certainly in the medium term: their failure of political judgement.

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A question of competence

19/04/2012, 10:00:21 AM

by Pat Mcfadden

For most of the period since the election, the government has been pretty successful at setting the agenda, particularly around the central question of tax and spend.

The spending cuts they have put through, they argue, are done more in sorrow than in anger and although these are tough decisions it’s really all Labour’s fault for letting things get out of hand. This has been the dominant narrative. Labour’s counter argument that the growth of the deficit was a necessary (and internationally replicated) step to stop recession turning into depression has struggled to be heard.

That was the framework of UK politics until recently. But something has changed. I don’t believe this is the politics of specific measures like the granny tax or the pasty tax. There have been plenty other individual measures people have disliked in the past two years but they have been largely accepted because of the acceptance of the dominant political narrative.

What has changed is the public’s judgement about the government’s competence. In other words, the key change is no single measure but rather the different lens through which the government is now seen. Put bluntly, people will forgive a government a lot of unpopular measures if they think the government knows’ what it’s doing. They will be a lot less forgiving if they think they don’t.

The key break point was petrol.

Whatever the outcome of the current negotiations in the drivers’ dispute, the queues outside filling stations a couple of weeks ago were unnecessary and dangerous. I don’t know if the government whipped this up because they wanted a strike story or because of “genuine” incompetence but it doesn’t really matter. The public know that the government screwed up.

There was no need to tell people to rush to the filling station, and certainly no need for the stuff about jerry cans. No strike had been called and seven days’ notice is required anyway. Petrol delivery and use is a very delicate just-in-time process. We are highly dependent on it and essentially, the nation’s fuel stock is in the tanks of our cars. Any unnecessary upset in that system is irresponsible and dangerous. Better and safer advice would have been to store stamps in jerry cans.

This petrol screw up has changed the way the public are looking at other decisions. The government is losing the benefit of the doubt on the budget issues around pensioners’ taxes and VAT on hot food. Suddenly they look more vulnerable. For the first time in two years, Labour has an opening. Of course it remains to be seen whether we can take advantage of it, but the opening is there.

The importance of this competence question should not be underestimated. People are less ideological than most politicians think. They will often believe in some things advocated traditionally by one party and some other things advocated traditionally by another. Of course in the end it’s a choice on a package of these. But whatever the ideology of a government, the voting public expects them to know what they’re doing. For the first time since the election, that is now in doubt.

Pat McFadden is Labour MP for Wolverhampton South East.

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