Archive: 13 September – 19 September 2010
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Friday 17 September 2010
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Fredrik Reinfeldt, the Swedish prime minister, pictured on the right with Jose Manuel Barroso, the European commission president, is on course to win the election. Photograph: Georges Gobet/AFP/Getty Images
The Liberal Democrats will be in nervous mood as they gather in Liverpool this weekend for their annual conference.
With opinion polls showing a fall in their support, many party members will be asking whether they will suffer the usual fate of junior coalition partners: oblivion at the next election.
But hopeful news arrives from Sweden. The Conservative-Liberal coalition appears to be on course for victory in the general election four years after it unseated the mighty Social Democrats.
A second consecutive victory for Fredrik Reinfeldt, the Swedish prime minister who leads the conservative Moderate Party, will be a highly significant achievement. The Social Democrats have governed Sweden for 65 of the past 78 years. Centre right governments in Sweden usually just hold power for a few years before voters return to the comforting embrace of the Social Democrats.
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Local council spending over £500: Islington published its data in PDF format. Photograph: Garry Weaser for the Guardian
Ask every local authority in England to publish all its spending over £500 in an open format and what do you get? A whole load of PDFs. Get our list of the best and the worst
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Vince Cable has claimed the immigration cap is doing 'great damage' to the economy. Photograph: Mark Pinder
The business secretary should not quit over the immigration cap, as his wisdom is needed to prevent coalition chaos
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Thursday 16 September 2010
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A village boy runs through a parched field in Berhampur, India. Should the UK halt aid to India? Photograph: Biswaranjan Rout/AP
We know the international development secretary, Andrew Mitchell, is a busy man ahead of next week's UN summit, but we need answers to more of the questions posed during yesterday's online chat
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Pope Benedict XVI arrives in Edinburgh to begin the first papal state visit to the UK. Photograph: Andrew Milligan/PA
Oh dear. What is it about the pope's visit that has attracted such a gallery of oddballs, exhibitionists and grotesques to intrude upon it? Cardinal Walter Kasper's magnificently misjudged comment on godless, third-world Britain is only the latest contribution to what now amounts to a major motorway pile-up.
The theme of Pope Benedict XVI's visit is supposed to be "heart speaks unto heart", the conciliatory motto of John Henry Newman, the charismatic 19th century Anglican convert to Catholicism whom the Pope will beatify on the road to sainthood.
It is a dubious piece of intellectual body-snatching to which I will return in a moment. Poor Pope Benny; he is Gordon Brown to John Paul II's Tony Blair, albeit with Blair's talent for attracting unforgiving enemies, and I fear his state visit will be a discordant flop. Even Chris Patten, who seems to be keeping the show on the road, will be hard-pressed to stay cheerful.
But half-baked miscalculation is not confined to one side of this hugely enjoyable spat – which I have avoided joining up to now. Why?
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An EU flag. Photograph: Laura Ronchi/Getty Images
Andrew Sparrow with all today's political news as it happens
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Wednesday 15 September 2010
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Steve Webb, the pensions minister. Photograph: /PA
I'm doing an interview tomorrow with Steve Webb, the Lib Dem pensions minister, and, in the belief that 10,000 minds are better than one, I'd like you to suggest some questions.
Webb is a minister of state (ie one rank below a cabinet minister) and he's in charge of pretty much everything to do with pensions. Webb and his boss, Iain Duncan Smith, have done one big pensions event since the election, which they used to commit themselves to raising the state pension age, restoring the link between the state pensions and earnings and reviewing auto-enrolment. Here's the press release, here's Webb's speech, and here's Duncan Smith's speech. I'll be asking questions about all these.
Webb is also in charge of winter fuel payments. The coalition agreement says that these will be "protected", but it does not specify what that means. I'll be asking about this issue too. In their election manifesto, the Lib Dems said the age people needed to reach to qualify for winter fuel payments ought to be raised to 65. Has Webb persuaded George Osborne and Duncan Smith that this is a good idea?
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Remember Margaret Thatcher's desire to starve terrorists of the "oxygen of publicity"?
The former prime minister's remark was a precursor to the Tories' broadcasting ban in the late 1980s that prevented supporters of the Provisional IRA in Sinn Féin – or indeed loyalists – from talking freely on the UK's airwaves. The thinking behind this prohibition was that terrorist groups were exploiting the broadcasters, that the enemies of democracy were subverting the system by harnessing a key tenet of democracy – a free, open media.
Of course the ban led to surreal outcomes such as actors' voices replacing the actual voices of Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness and other key players in the Northern Irish politico-paramilitary world. At its most extreme the ban's absurdity was exposed on the BBC comedy mock-news show The Day Today when Steve Coogan, playing a Sinn Féin spokesman, sucked in helium before an interview in order "to subtract credibility from his statements".
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James Bond, played by Daniel Craig in Casino Royale, would never have his cover blown by a foreign secretay. Photograph: Public domain
Has William Hague broken the unwritten rule that foreign secretaries never confirm that MI6 has a network of spies overseas?
Hague entered this highly sensitive area when he appeared before a Commons select committee yesterday. His comments came when he was asked by Bernard Jenkin, the Conservative chairman of the commons public administration select committee, about his strategy for foreign policy. The committee is holding an enquiry which is asking: Who does UK Grand Strategy?
Jenkin was asking Hague whether the ordinary footsoldiers of British foreign policy were now drawing up strategy "on the hoof" after the new government scrapped the strategy unit at the foreign office. Here is their exchange:
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A masked member of the Real IRA at a Republican Easter commemoration ceremony at Creggan cemetery in Londonderry. Photograph: Niall Carson/PA Wire/Press Association Images
In an obvious sense the Real IRA's threat to start murdering bankers is a sinister development. But in another, Henry McDonald's account in today's Guardian of his dealings with the republican splinter group is PG Wodehouse stuff.
All that stuff about a memory stick wrapped in a surgical glove lodged in a toilet bowl should be enough to cheer the hardest heart. Let's hope that putting it there left tell-tale turd on someone's balaclava.
And only a very self-absorbed little group of narcissists would fail to spot the irony of a self-styled IRA attacking the "criminal " activity of bankers, not least their willingness to "grease the politicians palms". Continue reading...
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Development secretary Andrew Mitchell. Photograph: Martin Argles for the Guardian
Post your questions to development secretary Andrew Mitchell, who will be live online on the Poverty Matters blog today
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BP boss Tony Hayward appears before the energy and climate change committee in the House of Commons. Photograph: Pa Wire/PA
Catch up with the day's political development's - as they happened
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Tuesday 14 September 2010
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Billy Wright, the murdered loyalist, pictured at a 1996 rally where he was supported by a leading DUP MP. Photograph: Crispin Rodwell/Rex Features
I'll never forget the first time I met Billy Wright.
I was pulling into the car park of a hotel in Portadown, Co Armagh, when I noticed a man slouched in the driver's seat of a parked car. I peered over and noticed the sinister features of the man known as King Rat.
I thought it would be best not to antagonise Wright, one of Northern Ireland's most brutal sectarian killers. So I approached him, introduced myself as the Times's Belfast correspondent and had a brief conversation.
My encounter with Wright took place on a warm summer's day shortly after the annual showdown between members of the Orange Order and nationalists at nearby Drumcree. He had threatened to spray the police with petrol from a tank which his supporters had driven into the grounds of the church at Drumcree in the back of a JCB digger.
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Michael Gove, the education secretary. Photograph: Anthony Devlin/PA
If you were wondering why Michael Gove, the education secretary, chose this week to risk alienating the rightwing press with his suggestions that free schools and academies should be able to give preference to poor children in their selection procedures, you need look no further than the Liberal Democrat conference agenda.
Sarah Teather, the Liberal Democrat education minister, is facing a damning conference motion condemning free schools as wasteful, socially divisive and liable to depress educational outcomes for pupils in general.
This motion is due to be debated next Monday morning, hours before the great helmsman Nick Clegg gets to to the rostrum to spell out the joys of coalition government. The motion calls on parents to boycott free schools.
But now an amendment has appeared to save Teather by removing all direct criticism of free schools.
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A mother and her six-week-old child wait at a health centre in Katine, Uganda. The UK government has pledged to cut maternal deaths by 2015. Photograph: Guardian
Nick Clegg: The UK is committed to doubling the number of women who survive pregnancy and childbirth over the next five years
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Michael Gove, who is giving the new generation of academies and 'free' schools the right to give admissions priority to children from poor families if they want to do so. Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images
Reading about David Cameron's family background after his father died the other day reinforced my provisional hunch that, despite evidence to the contrary, the coalition's core motivation is naïve rather than cynical. It sounds like a very wholesome childhood. Lucky Dave.
Top Cameroon ally and adopted child Michael Gove's latest move further underpins that conclusion. The schools secretary is giving the new generation of academies and so-called "free" schools the right to give admissions priority to children from poor families if they want to do so.
Why might they want to do that? All sorts of reasons, ranging from idealistic to the financial "pupil premium" for low-income families, which Lib Dem ministers insisted the coalition endorse.
Will they do it in real life? I'm doubtful, not least because Gove is likely to be proved wrong in asserting there is a pent-up demand for "free" schools in Britain. Admittedly, I frequently read they are popular among black parents in the US – part of the recovery story in New Orleans too – who feel the mainstream system lets down their kids.
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Parliament is preparing to welcome up to 350 new MPs, potentially the highest intake in decades. Photograph: Tim Ireland/PA
Join Andrew Sparrow for rolling coverage of the day's political developments as they happen
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Our new development data site. Click here to use it
See how you can use our site to find the world's top aid and development data
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Monday 13 September 2010
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John Prescott is supporting David Miliband because he is the only Labour leadership candidate prepared to defend the last government. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
David Miliband has bagged another important endorsement.
John Prescott, who regarded himself as the keeper of the Labour movement's flame as Tony Blair's deputy, has made clear that he is supporting the shadow foreign secretary.
The former deputy prime minister, now known as Lord Prescott, is not planning to embrace David Miliband in public. He is standing as Labour treasurer and so believes he needs to be on friendly terms with all the candidates.
But Prescott blogged this afternoon to dismiss a claim in the Sunday Times that he had joined forces with Neil Kinnock to endorse Ed Miliband. He cited a blog he posted a week ago on Sunday in which he praised David Miliband for defending the last government's record.
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Delegates listen to the TUC general secretary, Brendan Barber, at the annual TUC conference in Manchester. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
Perhaps inevitably, spending cuts will be the dominant theme at the 142nd TUC conference, which begins in Manchester today.
Union leaders will attempt to challenge the coalition government's insistence that deep cuts in public spending are needed over a short time – or that they are needed at all, in the case of leftwing unions such as the Public and Commercial Services union.
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Andrew Mitchell, our coalition secretary of state for international development (Dfid), always strikes me as a smooth but decent enough chap – one who finds himself in a curious political position as the Treasury's vultures circle Whitehall.
As part of David Cameron's process of detoxifying the Tory brand (widespread current use of the word "coalition" shows how successful he has been), Mitchell's budget has been ring-fenced from cuts, alongside the NHS budget.
On one level, that's admirable. Whatever problems we encounter as a result of the coalition's self-inflicted austerity, they are modest compared with the misfortunes of the world's poorest. We'll come back to that. Continue reading...
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Pledge tracker. Photograph: Guardian
Simon Jeffery: Pledge tracker is continuting its work to monitor the coalition agreement. This is some of what has happened over the last month
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Brendan Barber speaking at the TUC conference in Liverpool. Photograph: Andrew Yates/AFP/Getty Images
Join Andrew Sparrow for rolling coverage of developments from Westminster and beyond including updates from the TUC conference
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