Archive: 28 June – 4 July 2010
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Friday 2 July 2010
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Nick Clegg today learnt that David Cameron's party will fight him tooth and nail on electoral reform. Photograph: Matt Cardy/Getty Images
As a veteran of EU trade negotiations, Nick Clegg always knew that life in Britain's first peacetime coalition government since the 1930s was never going to be easy.
The deputy prime minister may have looked relaxed last night when he pitched up at the Spectator's summer party with David Cameron. Sipping orange juice – no Pol Roger champagne for them in these straitened times – they looked completely at ease as they chatted to the magazine's editor Fraser Nelson.
But Nelson is a leading opponent of electoral reform. Clegg was today given a taste of the formidable power of this group after the Guardian revealed that the Lib Dem leader will announce that a referendum is to be held on 5 May next year on whether to introduce AV.
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Nick Clegg faces problems if he loses his referendum on electoral reform. Photograph: Dani Pozo/AFP/Getty Images
So it looks as though we are going to get our promised referendum on electoral reform – and the alternative vote (AV) model – early after all.
Nick Clegg has persuaded David Cameron to aim for 6 May, Patrick Wintour and Allegra Stratton report this morning in a story that has been widely followed up.
This is a major gamble all round. Clegg, who turned up at the Spectator magazine's summer party with Cameron looking rather more uneasy than Dave among the piranhas, is also expected to announce a boundary shake-up to try and make constituencies more equal – ie fairer to the Tories.
If this was easy it would have been done by now, but voters selfishly insist on getting on with their own lives and moving jobs/homes without regard to constituency boundaries. The more they move from city to suburb and beyond, the more Conservative votes pile up to no additional purpose.
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Thursday 1 July 2010
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Not only can you tell the deputy PM to do something on the magic mushroom laws, you can also write your own tags
Coalition government, joint government – call it what you will. Actually, joint government may be the best choice as calls to legalise cannabis (and magic mushrooms, see above) lead Nick Clegg's crowdsourced attempt to find out what unnecessary laws the British people want to see repealed.
The website, called Your Freedom, offers three broad categories restoring civil liberties, repealing unnecessary laws and cutting business and third sector regulations.
Where you see a button – in the coalition's favourite green – that reads "Submit an idea", you can click it, write your suggestion (after registering) and then wait for others to rate or comment on it.
Despite the civil-liberties ring to its name, Your Freedom has a strong business /red-tape focus. In Clegg's introductory video he says: "For too long new laws have taken away your freedom, interfered in everyday life and made it difficult for businesses to get on." Though possibly not the laws blocking the legal sale of cannabis and other narcotics, which have made it easier for businesses on the other side of the law to get on.
Whenever anything like this launches it is easy to mock (see above) or be the first to dismissively declare it has backfired (which may not happen till later). Whether it does or not depends on if the exercise continues and how – or if – the government chooses to act on the suggestions. Continue reading...
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The Tory MP Philip Hollobone has introduced a bill to ban the wearing of the burka in Britain – but it has little chance of becoming law. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images
I doubt if you've noticed, in the course of a busy day, that the Tory MP Philip Hollobone is introducing a bill to ban the burqa in Britain.
The Eurosceptic backbencher's move would bring the UK into line with similar efforts currently being made across the Channel. But even the Daily Mail's enthusiastic account admits that his intolerant gesture towards this unpleasant practice has "little chance" of becoming law.
Far less chance, even, than the RMT leader Bob Crow's appeal (which the Mail also reports with glee) for what he calls "a sustained campaign of generalised strikes" against the coalition's "fiscal fascism" in the public sector cuts battle.
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Samantha Cameron with a Madame Tussauds waxwork of her husband David today. Photograph: Rex Features
Hélène Mulholland with all today's politics news as it happened, including Nick Clegg's appeal to the public to nominate laws to be repealed, and William Hague's attempt to increase UK influence in the EU
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Wednesday 30 June 2010
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Michael Howard revived a 50 year rivalry when he criticised Kenneth Clarke. Photograph: Martin Argles
The inhabitants of the Westminster village were briefly transported back to Cambridge University in the early 1960s this afternoon.
Kenneth Clarke and Michael Howard, friends and rivals since they sat on the Cambridge University Conservative Association committee in 1963, showed they had lost none of their fire when they locked horns over prisons policy.
Howard, who succeeded Clarke as home secretary in 1993, popped up on Radio 4's PM programme to take issue with his old friend's attack on the Victorian "bang 'em up" prison culture of the past 20 years.
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Harriet Harman and Alistair Darling at prime minister's questions today. Photograph: PA
There was a fantastic spat today over Larry Elliott's exclusive piece in the Guardian claiming the Treasury had not published a forecast prepared for the emergency budget showing it would increase unemployment by 1.3m.
The spat, initially between David Cameron and Harriet Harman, continued once PMQs was over as disagreement broke out between Rupert Harrison, George Osborne's economics adviser, and Torsten Henricson-Bell, the economics adviser to Alistair Darling. At times the prime minister's spokesman and a former Treasury official joined in. These three are not just spinners: they are proper economists.
Normally one side briefs and then the other counter-briefs, but this time they interrupted each other's spin, contradicting one another and hurling statistics and comparisons at one another at a rate of knots. Anyone who thinks economics is a dismal science should have seen them go hammer and tongs, demanding whether table 5.5 on page six, or whatever, could be validly compared with table etc. The whole thing lasted half an hour, and for its opening 15 minutes had an audience of 15 or so reporters.
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David Cameron at PMQs today. Photograph: BBC
Minute-by-minute coverage of PMQs as David Cameron faces questions from the Commons. With Paul Owen
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Simon Burns MP: hit out at the Speaker. Photograph: Martin Godwin for the Guardian
Oh dear. Today's papers carry gleeful accounts – including one from our own Simon Hoggart – of Tory minister Simon Burns getting cross with John Bercow, the Speaker, to the point of calling him a "stupid, sanctimonious little dwarf", or words to that effect.
This is neither kind nor wise. Careers do not prosper as a result. It suggests a lack of control.
And the diminutive Bercow, the target of much Tory criticism and private loathing, is beyond their reach now. He was re-elected by the new house after 6 May with barely a ripple of the widely-predicted revolt. We knew he would be, didn't we?
Burns, on the other hand, is 57 and was a junior health minister (1996-97) under John Major. He has always struck me as an affable enough man, but is lucky to have got a job in Andrew Lansley's team this time when the Wrinkly Police are having older people put down everywhere. He must know it.
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British helicopters fly over Basra, southern Iraq, in April 2003. Photograph: Reuters
Andrew Sparrow with live coverage from the Chilcot inquiry as Lord Jay, Iain MacLeod and Cathy Adams give evidence
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Tuesday 29 June 2010
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David Cameron indicated he would like to remain as prime minister for a decade during his first PMdirect question and answer session at Trinity College, Leeds. Photograph: John Giles/PA
Does David Cameron harbour ambitions of following in the footsteps of Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair who both chalked up a decade in Downing Street?
The prime minister has indicated in recent weeks that he is more interested in securing an impressive record in office rather than hanging round forever. This is what he said at the G20 summit in Toronto last week:
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Prince Charles' finances. Photograph: Richard Pohle/AFP/Getty Images
The Prince of Wales has released details of his income and outgoings. Get the data - as a spreadsheet
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Ed Balls is running an energetic campaign for the Labour leadership. Photograph: David Levene
They must be putting something special in the cakes baked with such pride in the Cooper-Balls household.
Yesterday in the Commons Yvette Cooper provided a masterclass in how to oppose the government when she picked apart the budget.
Today Ed Balls is out of the blocks leading the charge against the coalition cabinet which is holding its first meeting out of London. The Labour leadership contender has steered clear of the easiest attack on the coalition.
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Frank Field. Photograph: Frank Baron
It's a brave man who ventures to frame an argument in terms of class and gender that does not pay routine respect to the proposition that women still get a very hard time in our society. As Patrick Wintour reports in today's Guardian, Labour's Frank Field has done just that. Typical Frank, the troublemaker.
With coalition ministers thrashing around to find a welfare settlement that is both cheaper and more effective in getting unemployed-and-stuck people, some of them third-generation jobless, into the labour market – at a tough time too – Field used his new platform as government poverty adviser to challenge current Labour orthodoxy.
Much of it hinges on the belief that young single mothers are better off – and their kids better off too – if they work. Much was done under Gordon Brown to make low-paid work worthwhile, not least through tax credits to working families – a policy the coalition is trimming, but not abandoning.
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David Cameron: torture inquiry announcement expected tomorrow. Photograph: Andrew Yates/AP
Andrew Sparrow with all today's politics news as it happens – including the resumption of the Chilcot inquiry and Labour leadership campaigning by Ed Miliband
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Monday 28 June 2010
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Yvette Cooper launched Labour's fiercest attack on the budget. Photograph: Sarah Lee/Guardian
Is Labour losing out on a star? Yvette Cooper has just impressed the Labour benches with a tour de force of a speech in the Commons in which she picked apart the budget for imposing "savage" cuts that are "nastier" than anything introduced by Margaret Thatcher.
Cooper has decided not to contest the Labour leadership, turning it into something of a pedestrian contest between four male former special advisers and Diane Abbott on the left. It should be said that Cooper's husband, Ed Balls, is helping to liven the contest with a vigorous attack on the coalition for the VAT rise and for cutting free school meals.
But Labour MPs will be wondering whether they are missing out on a star after this afternoon's debate.
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Non-EU immigration into the UK. Click image for full graphic. Illustration: Finbarr Sheehy for the Guardian
The government is proposing to cap non-EU immigration into the UK. So, what are the facts?
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Michael White: The new kid on the block has been well received at G8 and G20, but the media will quickly turn on its fallen idol when he fails Continue reading...
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Houses of Parliament. Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian
Rolling coverage of all the latest developments from Westminster and beyond
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