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Friday News Review

08/04/2011, 06:56:05 AM

U-turn to fill MOD black hole

David Cameron is poised for another humiliating U-turn as the crisis in Libya forces him to rethink the Government’s savage defence cuts. Chancellor George Osborne has been shamed into finding an extra £250million to prevent more equipment and troops being scrapped while British forces are in action. Military chiefs are pushing him to go much further and undo some of the brutal austerity measures already inflicted on the armed forces in last autumn’s defence review. One senior commander said the debate is “live” and that the Prime Minister “is very much part of it”. Reversing defence cuts would the latest in a long line of about-turns by Mr Cameron. Ending free school milk, axing books for young children, cutting school sport, scrapping NHS Direct, selling off Britain’s forests and bringing in anonymity for suspected rapists are among the policies that have been dropped. – Daily Mirror

The Prime Minister is “actively engaged” in a reassessment of Britain’s military capabilities and planned reductions in equipment and manpower, sources have disclosed. The rethink has raised hopes that some of the cuts to military aircraft and ships in the Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR) could be postponed or even reversed. Insiders said it was not too late for a change of mind on the decision to cut the number of RAF Tornados and scrap surveillance planes. Some Royal Navy frigates could also be spared, or have their retirement delayed. In the first sign of compromise on defence cuts, Mr Cameron has ordered the Treasury to give the Ministry of Defence a reprieve on its overspent 2011-12 budget. The £800 million climbdown will spare the Armed Forces further cuts this year. Senior government figures admitted that the Libyan conflict has raised questions about the wisdom of cuts that will leave Britain facing a “dip” in its military capabilities for several years. “The debate is live. The Prime Minister is very much part of it. There’s a lot of objective thinking going on,” said a senior defence source. – Daily Telegraph

We really are all in this together

If she was expecting a lavish treat, she was in for a sore surprise. Mindful of how a luxury holiday would appear amid massive public spending cuts, David and Samantha Cameron flew to Spain with budget airline Ryanair to celebrate her 40th birthday. And despite their wealth, they stayed in a ‘mid-market’ hotel. No special treatment: A fellow passenger took this photograph of the couple in the departure lounge ahead of the Ryanair flight from Stansted airport to Malaga, in southern Spain, on Wednesday afternoon A fellow passenger took a photograph of the couple in the departure lounge ahead of the flight from Stansted airport to Malaga, in southern Spain, on Wednesday afternoon. They will fly home today. – Daily Mail

They could have been any other couple waiting to catch their flight. But it was the Prime Minister and his wife who were spotted waiting along with everyone else to fly with low-cost airline Ryanair from Stansted Airport to Granada in Spain. David Cameron whisked his wife away without their three children on a flight for a short break to mark her impending 40th birthday. Mrs Cameron does not reach the milestone age until later this month, but the couple took the start of the Easter recess to spend some time together. It is the first time the couple have been abroad on holiday since Mr Cameron became Prime Minister last May. – the Scotsman

Hollow words over interns

Is it business as usual for Liberal Democrat MPs advertising for interns days after Nick Clegg said he’d stamp out the practice of unpaid work? That could certainly be the charge. The office of John Leech MP told one prospective intern that they wouldn’t get paid because the new rules only apply to Whitehall and the party’s Cowley Street HQ, not MPs, according to the group Intern Aware. Party figures admit that yes, this is technically the case, they can’t tell their MPs what to do as they fall under the remit of Ipsa, the expenses watchdog. Leaders can’t tell their MPs what to do? That may be news to some. Clegg also seemed to think he could on Tuesday, when he said: “I’ve announced that in my capacity as leader of the Liberal Democrats that we now have put an end to that system within the Lib Dem Parliamentary party. From now on, all internships should be properly advertised, they should be subject to a meritocratic process and people should be properly supported and remunerated. Lunch costs, travel costs and so on.” – Sky News

Just days after Nick Clegg made an earnest pledge to improve expenses for the Liberal Democrats’ army of unpaid interns, The Capitalist was amused to see three job ads for internships at the party on the Work for an MP (w4mp) website offering barely a cup of tea. The “short volunteer opportunity” to work in the offices of Greg Mulholland, MP for the Leeds North West, offers no financial reward at all, while the internship at the offices of Bradford East’s MP David Ward says “some expenses” can be met “by agreement”. And a school-leaver helping out on the local campaign trail for the Lewes Liberal Democrats would presumably want a roof over their head at the end of the working day – but lodgings for the lucky candidate are only “possibly” an option “if required”. In a jargon-filled display of passing the buck, the party said it could only directly manage internships at the central Cowley Street HQ. – City AM

Where have all the Lib Dems gone?

The Liberal democrats face a double blow at next month’s council elections, when they will field fewer candidates than usual and could be the main victims of a Labour recovery. More than 9,000 seats are up for grabs, about 5,000 of which are held by the Conservatives, 1,800 the Liberal Democrats, 1,600 by Labour and 800 by other parties and independents. Figures from town halls yesterday showed that the Lib Dems have candidates to put up in only 59 per cent of the seats, down from 64 per cent when they were last fought four years ago. The biggest falls appear to be in the south-east and north-west, both down about 10 per cent. Labour will contest 72 per cent – up from 60 per cent last time. The increase reflects a drive to fight back in the south, where the party did badly at last year’s general election. The Tories will field candidates in 93 per cent of the seats next month, up from 88 per cent in 2007. – the Independent

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Why Sheffield hated having the Lib Dems for the weekend

14/03/2011, 11:30:16 AM

by Kevin Meagher

Last May, I stood on the periphery of a throng of hyped-up students, Lib Dem activists (you can always spot them) and passers-by outside Sheffield City Hall waiting for Nick Clegg to disembark from his general election battlebus.

I had come to witness the true scale of Cleggmania as the Lib Dem leader arrived back in the city he represents to make his final speech at an open air rally. After an encomium – for the benefit of the television cameras – about “the new politics”, the crowd melted away and the rest, well, is history.

Fast forward ten months.

The hope and pluralism that the public felt Clegg personified have given way to anger and resentment towards him. “I agree with Nick” was a sentiment the apolitical, urban middle classes took to their hearts. His fall from public affection has been dramatic and real. No one seems to agree with Nick any more. He is the corporeal representation of that most loathed characteristic of the modern politician: career over principle.

Meanwhile, the Lib Dems rejoice at opinion polls that put them in double digits; with neighbouring Barnsley the scene of their sixth place in the Parliamentary by-election just a week and a half ago.

The contrast in Lib Dem fortunes from those heady days last spring is hard to overestimate. At the weekend, I again stood outside the City Hall, the venue for their spring conference. The free and easy atmosphere of last May was gone; with the square encased behind a six-foot steel fence (supplied, it turns out, by a Sheffield company). (more…)

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Monday News Review

14/03/2011, 06:18:28 AM

Lib Dems force rethink on NHS reforms

Nick Clegg yesterday made a desperate attempt to prevent a Lib Dem revolt over the Tories’ NHS shake-up. Just hours after Party activists voted against the reforms, the Deputy Prime Minister insisted the Coalition was not trying to privatise the health service. The plans will let market forces run riot in the NHS and senior Lib Dems fear it will inflict more damage on them than the broken tuition fees promise. But, speaking at the spring conference yesterday, Mr Clegg said: “What I need you to know is all of us in Government are listening and that we take those concerns seriously.” Mr Clegg also used his speech in Sheffield to rally his Party after the Barnsley by-election battering. Responding to claims he was too close to the Tories, he joked: “I haven’t been kidnapped by David Cameron, I haven’t changed one bit.” He added: “Yes, we’ve had to toughen up. But we will never lose our soul.” The Deputy PM mocked Mr Cameron for opposing electoral reform. He said the only people in the “No” to the alternative vote camp were the Conservatives, the BNP, John Prescott, Norman Tebbit and David Owen. Mr Clegg was also ridiculed for claiming the Coalition was “not a cuts Government”. Labour MP Tom Watson said: “He’s living in cloud cuckoo land.” – Daily Mirror

Ministers signalled a potential climbdown over the Government’s controversial health reforms last night – after Liberal Democrats delivered Nick Clegg a bloody nose on the issue. Tory Health Secretary Andrew Lansley said the reforms, which would put GPs in charge of the £80billion NHS commissioning budget, remained ‘under review’ in the wake of criticism from inside and outside Government. Critics claim the changes will break up the NHS and lead to greater privatisation and less accountability. Lib Dem activists at the party’s spring conference threw out a motion supporting the Government’s health reforms over the weekend and replaced it with a text that was highly critical of the changes. The British Medical Association will also debate a series of critical motions on the reforms at an emergency conference later this week – including one expressing no confidence in Mr Lansley. – Daily Mail (more…)

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Choosing office over power has destroyed the Lib Dems

02/02/2011, 07:00:55 AM

by Kevin Meagher

If a general election were called right now, just one in ten voters
would plump for the Liberal Democrats, according to the latest brace of
opinion polls.

That’s not strictly true, though. YouGov’s tracker poll actually has them on eight percent. It is ComRes that has them scaling the dizzying double-digit heights of 10%.

Either way, this state of affairs represents a not insignificant problem
for our deputy prime minister; the first mate on the deck of our ship of state. Unfortunately for him, however, the party he leads is holed below the waterline and is still taking in the wet stuff.

Of course, polls yoyo up and down. But these dreadful numbers are merely a
symptom of the Lib Dems’ essential malady: they simply have no clear purpose any more.

Like their Edwardian counterparts who went the way of the dodo in the early
1900s, they now cease to have what marketing gurus call a USP – Unique Selling Point.

By joining with the Conservatives, they have trashed their brand as Westminster’s good guys. It is an irrecoverable loss. Their identity and independence is shattered. The price of joining with the “nasty” Tories is losing the “nice” party label. There is no splitting the difference on that point. (more…)

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Can we please just ignore the Lib Dems?

24/01/2011, 10:30:40 AM

by Rob Marchant

While recent headlines may have all but obliterated from memory Ed’s recent fabians speech, it is also worth lingering on his more prescriptive, post-Oldham Guardian article from the day before. If Ed did not go as far as Neal Lawson did and metaphorically throw open the gates of Victoria Street to Lib Dem members to invite them in for tea, he certainly signalled a rapprochement which might live to be seen as unwise. Unwise because it seems doomed to fail, and unwise also because such a failure would be likely to come back and bite us. When you attempt to woo, rejection leaves you looking undesirable.

There are some important barriers to cooperation. First, the Lib Dems themselves: as the FT wryly observed, if you want to cooperate with another party, best not filibuster it in the Lords on its touchstone issue (voting reform), or describe it as “tragic”. Also, be aware that it may be counterproductive: some Lib Dems may just react angrily to what they see as an opportunist attempt to split their party. Or it may simply be ignored, by most. (more…)

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A reckoning for the second rate: the Lib Dems are simply not qualified to govern

24/12/2010, 07:00:10 AM

by Dan Hodges

In his classic work Fever Pitch, the book that finally enabled middle class supporters to emerge from the football closet, Nick Hornby devotes a whole chapter to a single player, Gus Caesar.

Caesar’s place in literary history was secured in the eighty third minute of the 1988 League Cup final between Arsenal and Luton. With his side 2-1 up, the England under-21 defender chased down an innocuous ball in his own penalty area. Then something strange happened.

Some say he was distracted by a Luton striker who had moved goal side of him. Others that his studs became caught in the Wembley turf. Whatever the reason, with the option of sliding a pass to a colleague, or launching the ball to safety, he chose to do neither. Gus Caesar simply fell over. A melée ensued, in which Luton scrambled an equaliser. They went on to snatch a late winner and raise the trophy. Caesar was swiftly transferred, never playing in the top flight of football again. (more…)

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Thursday News Review

23/12/2010, 07:48:21 AM

Telegraph strikes again

David Heath, the deputy Leader of the House, said the Chancellor had the “capacity to get up one’s nose” and did not appreciate what it was like to lose £1,000 a year – the value of the cut in child benefit for higher earners. Paul Burstow, the care minister, told reporters from The Daily Telegraph: “I don’t want you to trust David Cameron.” And Andrew Stunell, the local government minister, said he did not know where the Prime Minister stood on the “sincerity monitor”. Norman Baker, the transport minister, even privately compared the Conservatives within government to the South African apartheid regime, claiming that it was his job to campaign from the “inside”. The disclosures come on the third day of this newspaper’s investigation into the true feelings of senior Liberal Democrats towards the Coalition. – Telegraph

Mr Baker is a minister in the transport department, working closely with the Conservative Secretary of State, Philip Hammond, and a junior minister, Theresa Villiers. “But what you end up doing in the Coalition, as much as we can is we play them off against each other. You try to get the Tories [to] do things. For example, telling you more than I should be telling you, in the Department for Transport, the rail minister, Theresa Villiers, is actually pretty sound on railways, the Secretary of State is more sceptical, so you know I’ll get Theresa Villiers to argue with him about that, because she can persuade him from the side of the Tory party, because she wants to deliver effectively what is Lib Dem policy.” – Telegraph

David Heath, the Liberal Democrat MP for Somerton and Frome, said that “the awful thing” about the General Election result was that it left his party with “no alternative” but to join forces with its Conservative rivals. He said his party would have been “wiped out” at the next election if they had refused to enter the Coalition, because voters would have asked, “What’s the point of the Liberal Democrats?” The former optician also said that some of his Tory colleagues “have no experience of how ordinary people live”. – Telegraph

Ed on the attack

Talk about a Christmas miracle: Ed Miliband has set about the task of Opposition with ruthless efficiency today. As both Guido and Nicholas Watt have noted, the Labour leader is all across the broadcast news this afternoon, after upping the heat on Vince Cable and the coalition. His party’s attack comes in the form of a letter sent by the shadow business secretary, John Denham, to the Cabinet Secretary, Gus O’Donnell. It asks, mischieveously, whether Vince Cable has broken the ministerial code by promising to wage war against Rupert Murdoch, and whether Jeremy Hunt is impartial enough to step into the breach. And while nothing is likely to come of these exhortations, they have already done their work in terms of grabbing Labour, and Miliband, some rare attention. – The Spectator

Ed Miliband’s new media advisers appear to be making their mark. Tom Baldwin and Bob Roberts have only been in their jobs for a few days but already the Labour party appears to have sharpened up its act. Miliband, who had struggled recently to develop a clear message, is dominating the headlines after outlining a sharp two-pronged attack on the government after the downgrading of Vince Cable’s position in cabinet. So far the signs indicate that Miliband is winning the media battle today but making no progress on substance. But Miliband has made a decisive mark in perhaps the most significant part of his intervention today – sharpening a broader strategic attack on the coalition. Miliband now wants to ram home a very simple message: Britain has a Conservative government, enacting Conservative policies that will alarm progressives by, for example, increasing child poverty. – Guardian (more…)

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I am not a Lab Dem. I am a free man.

14/12/2010, 07:00:16 AM

by Dan Hodges

Still they come. Nick Clegg’s tired, hungry, huddled masses. The Liberal Democrat refugees.

Labour is providing them with sanctuary. Of the 30,000 new members who have joined the party since the election, almost a third of them are reportedly former Lib Dem members.

The pace of the relief operation is set to intensify. The Sunday Times carried “a bold appeal” from Ed Miliband for “disaffected Liberal Democrat MPs to join the opposition to the coalition”. There are rumors that the shadow cabinet is preparing a charity re-mix of the Red Flag in time for Christmas. Billy Bragg is considering a “Lib Aid” concert at the O2.

OK, I made up those last bits. But our tanks are no longer parked on Clegg’s lawn. They’ve bulldozed through the French windows and are rumbling towards the dinning room.

In the wake of the tuition fees debacle, it may appear to be a sound strategy. The Lib Dems are a broken party. Just look at Vince Cable. At the start of the year he was one of the brightest stars in the political firmament. Standing at the dispatch box on Thursday, attempting to justify his tuition fee betrayal, he resembled one of the Germans at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark who have unleashed the furies of the covenant. It was as if the life force were being sucked from his body. (more…)

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The Lib Dems are in a race to destruction – with the church of England

29/11/2010, 03:00:07 PM

by Kevin Meagher

Poor old Rowan Williams. He is a decent man who deserves a break. Instead, all he gets is to see the Church of England fall apart on his watch. Last week’s general synod saw yet further attempts to bandage the gaping wounds in the Anglican communion. They go deep: divisions over fundamental points of theology; a pervasive sense that they have lost their way and are on the cusp of being eaten up by a larger rival.

Nick Clegg, the cherubic but rather less devout leader of the Liberal Democrats, faces parallel problems: simmering internal discord and an existential crisis about his party’s future. But Clegg does not deserve a break. He is the architect of the afflictions that beset his tribe.

Just as women bishops were inevitable once the general synod voted to allow the ordination of women clergy back in 1992, so, too, it should be a short journey of logic for the Lib Dems to realise that supporting a right-wing Tory government leads to VAT hikes, benefit cuts and scorched earth public services.

Despite the pervasive threats to his organisation, Rowan Williams’ emollient circumlocutions keep the show on the road. Clegg’s line to his own party, however, is now much tougher: welcome to coalition politics. Compromise is now a way of life. Deal with it. And for hitherto allies on the left, Clegg is equally disabusing. He used his recent Hugo Young Memorial Lecture to slam the door in the face of Labour ecumenists. “Old progressives” he opined, “emphasise the power and spending of the central state”. In contrast, shiny “new progressives” focus on “the power and freedom of citizens”. (more…)

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Conrad Landin blames Labour for the Browne report

18/10/2010, 11:30:20 AM

Reaction to the Browne report on higher education has focused on the broken promises of Liberal Democrats who pledged to vote against rises in tuition fees. For any opposition party, it is easy to fall into the trap of concentrating exclusively on the Lib Dems’ betrayal of their election pledges. Yes, this betrayal is the one, among many, that I still can’t get over – even more than their U-turn on the fundamental issue of the economy immediately after the election.

But the photos of Nick Clegg holding up his card pledging to vote against fee rises speak for themselves. While the media has devoted so much space to the betrayal that the morality of the rise in fees itself is put to one side. Which is exactly what David Cameron wants. (more…)

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