David Cameron has been lobbied by the deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, on the need to rewrite the government’s flagship benefit reform to help children suffering as a result.
Clegg proposed a series of changes to the £500-a-week cap, including exempting current claimants, in an attempt to ameliorate some of the worst consequences of the change, which critics claim will make 40,000 families homeless by making their current homes unaffordable.
It is understood Clegg made his appeal during a meeting attended by the chancellor, George Osborne, and Danny Alexander, chief secretary of the Treasury. Cameron asked the Liberal Democrats
2012’s first Prime Minister’s Questions started with a bit of a score draw about rail fares. It got rather heated as Ed Miliband said the government had allowed fares to go up by 11%. He said:
The last Labour government saw that the train companies were taking advantage of consumers…we took away that power from them
David Cameron retorted that:
The power (to increase fares well above inflation) was given to them to do that by the last Labour government.
Channel 4 News FactCheck, as usual,has an excellent analysis of this spat, concluding that they couldn’t give either men a “Fact” or “Fiction” …
Since the SNP won an overall majority in the Holyrood elections last year, there has been much talk of the independence referendum they pledged to have in the second half of their term. They have been tight-lipped on their plans.
There has been uncertainty on the legality of such a referendum. Even respected legal blogger Lallands Peat Worrier, himself an SNP supporter, has expressed that the terms of the Scotland Act may not allow it. And amid all the bluster of this blog post from senior SNP strategist Stephen Noon is …
The details are still to be confirmed but the proposed system could stop the sale of alcohol at below 40p to 50p a unit in shops and supermarkets and cost drinkers up to £700 million a year.
Who killed the EU treaty? Was it pre-meditated murder or manslaughter? Some say David Cameron wielded the knife. It is suggested that he went to Brussels with every intention of wrecking the treaty. It was politically impossible for him to deliver his party, regardless of concessions. On this charge, the Prime Minister is either hero or villain, depending on which side you are on.
For others, the crime is one of gross negligence. The list of failings is long and painful; the side-lining of diplomats in the Foreign Office in favour of Treasury officials, a 4am “take it or leave it”
I have yet to watch Meryl Streep’s portrayal of Margaret Thatcher. I’m sure it will be fascinating, but I just fear that it might also be a bit too painful – I find it hard to divorce my views on the politics of that era from my memories of avoidable hardship experienced by the community I grew up in. Then again, perhaps I should try and get over my Thatcherphobia and view her record a bit more dispassionately. Where better to start than Mrs T’s record on Europe?
Sat behind me in Parliament, amongst the ranks of my valued coalition colleagues, …
By Euro Lib Dem
| Thu 15th December 2011 - 5:26 pm
To everyone’s shock, the 8th European Council summit of the year heralded something momentous, though it was not the prayed-for saving of the Eurozone but David Cameron’s wielding of the mythical British veto like a modern day Excalibur.
But we have to question why was a ‘veto’ used? The proposed modifications of the Lisbon Treaty were supposed to provide the legal certainty for a fully functioning fiscal union because the German constitutional court, amongst others, would not have accepted a halfway house solution using constitutional wheezes. British Ministers have been at pains to emphasise over the last year that Eurozone integration …
When, earlier this year, David Cameron sanctioned the Conservative-dominated No to AV campaign to attack his until then unfailingly loyal deputy, he precipitated the end of coalition phase one. It had not meant to happen so quickly, but the Liberal Democrat reaction – the strategy of differentiation – soon followed.
The prime minister’s actions in Europe last week are a similar turning point. By pandering to the extremes in his party – by acting as Tory leader rather than prime minister, as Paddy Ashdown put it – David Cameron has forced Nick Clegg to once again rethink the Liberal Democrat approach …
By Paul Walter
| Wed 14th December 2011 - 12:53 pm
It was the last pre-Christmas Prime Minister’s Questions today and we saw the return of Nick Clegg loyally sitting at the PM’s right-hand side.
Ed Miliband started on the economy, and the news that unemployment is up again. He quoted David Cameron’s words when he came to office, saying that jobs would be “uppermost”. “What’s gone wrong?” asked the opposition leader.
Cameron’s main thrust during the 2010 election campaign was that new private sector jobs should lead the economic recovery and more than replace lost public sector jobs. Miliband did a good job of exposing that this bright idea has allegedly failed. …
By Stephen Tall
| Tue 13th December 2011 - 2:15 pm
Perhaps it’s because it’s Christmas. Or perhaps it’s because the right-wing press is frothing with excitement at the Prime Minister sticking it to Johnny Foreigner.
Either way, the last few days’ events have put me in mind of the speech Hugh Grant delivers as a British prime minister (coincidentally called David) in the film, Love Actually. You can watch the clip I’m thinking of here.
It’s a knowingly funny pastiche of Little Englander pride in this country’s past glories, invoking cultural icons such as Shakespeare, The Beatles, …
One of the problems with major European politico-economic events, such as the UK veto on fiscal measures wielded by PM David Cameron last weekend, is that it is hard to unravel what actually happened. As is often the case, we have a German view, a French view, a UK view, and then a European Commission and an European Central Bank view. Each slant is coloured by anonymous briefings and insider leaks.
The UK Conservative Party view, well spun in the Daily Telegraph, is that it is all the fault of the French and, to an extent, the Germans.
By Stephen Tall
| Tue 13th December 2011 - 7:45 am
“An avoidable disaster”: that is the verdict of the Financial Times’s Philip Stephens in a must-read article examining what went on behind the scenes of the Coalition’s strategy for approaching last week’s failed European summit. And his verdict on the Prime Minister and his advisers could scarcely be more scathing:
There was no great plan for a rupture. What some Tories now see as Mr Cameron’s Churchillian moment was rather the result of an inept negotiating strategy placed in the hands of an inexperienced prime minister.
So what did happen? On last night’s Newsnight former Lib Dem leader Lord Ashdown set …
By Stephen Tall
| Mon 12th December 2011 - 7:35 am
The shockwaves from David Cameron’s decision to reject the proposed ‘Merkozy’ EU treaty is still shaking politics. The UK stands isolated from the other 26 member states. Tory Eurosceptics and, early polls suggest, a majority of the British public think the Prime Minister has played a blinder, ‘sticking up for Britain’.
This is difficult territory for the Lib Dems. Our October survey of party members suggested a more Eurosceptical attitude than traditionally associated with the party, with 51% rejecting a move towards ever closer union.
However, there is nothing more guaranteed to put up liberals’ backs than the full-throated, …
Sat on a shelf a few metres away from me is a box containing the various military medals won by my relatives over previous generations. The medals criss-cross Europe, coming from different countries, over the three wars that had a German-French conflict at their centre. To British eyes that count of three wars may seem odd at first, but for the German and French politicians building new European structures in the aftermath of the Second World War, their heritage was one of three wars – the Franco-German war of 1870 and then the two World Wars.
For them something drastic was needed to stop the dreadful arrival of conflict three generations in a row, each time on a bigger, longer and bloodier scale. Moreover, the wars were not started despite popular opinion, for they were all popular to start with.
That background helps explain two of the defining features of the European project – the determination of French and German politicians to stick together with each other and a sense that whilst democracy is good and welcome, and a vital antidote to the grotesque internal horrors of the early twentieth century dictatorships, the European project is about binding countries together rather than about giving people more democratic control over international affairs.
Add in another, far more recent, event – Brown winning out over Blair in keeping Britain out of the Euro (the closest Britain got to joining, for under Major that was never likely) – and Britain’s isolation after the last Euro summit is no sudden departure but rather a sudden, stark reminder of the quieter trends that have long been going on. The summit did not create those trends, however sharply it illustrated them.
Germany and France are, for reasons of history and economics, desperate both to stick together and to save the Euro. It was never essential to do more than try a bit to make nice to a country that is outside the Euro and whose largest political party has so often been hostile to so much European work. A country, moreover, whose leader chose to take his political party out of European alliance with mainstream continental parties and who had done precious little alliance building over the previous years with the key sources of power.
When France or Germany can wheel in Britain as an ally in their jostling with each other, Britain can exert some successful leverage, but fundamentally a different history and being out of the Euro has always made it the dispensable one of the trio.
More crafty negotiation by Cameron might have avoided the stark outcome of the summit, but the failure of his negotiating tactics did not cause the rifts. It simply shone a sharp light on the long standing political dynamic at the heart of Europe.
What the British government asked for at the European summit was not unpalatable to ardent pro-Europeans – Sarah Ludford MEP called it “reasonable” and Graham Watson MEP went one step further to call it “perfectly reasonable”.
But starting with that negotiating list, Cameron’s tactics at the summit did go off the rails, especially in turning down of the deal suggested by the President of the European Council only then to see the whole room turn against Cameron. Talking to people who saw Cameron’s support team after the talks broke down, they seemed genuinely shocked that they negotiating had turned out so badly and senior Liberal Democrats have been extremely critical of Cameron’s negotiating tactics at the summit. That the Lib Dem Deputy Head of Press has been retweeting today’s Independent story about Clegg’s fury over how Cameron conducted the talks is a pretty strong steer as to how accurate that story is. As one Lib Dem told The Observer:
He could not believe that Cameron hadn’t tried to play for more time. A menu of choices wasn’t deployed as a negotiating tool but instead was presented as a take it or leave it ultimatum. That is not how he would have played Britain’s hand.
But if you have allies who want talks to succeed with you as part of the outcome, when you dig yourself into such a hole people come to help pull you out. That is what would have happened if France or Germany had got into a hole. In Britain’s case, people did not come rushing to pull Britain out, instead they were happy to walk away from the hole.
As for the fallout, it is riddled with ironies. If the summit’s fiscal deal works and saves the Euro, that will continue the trend towards Britain being the outsider, but avoiding economic meltdown on the continent will be good news for our own economy. If the deal fails, then Cameron’s unwillingness to back it will look better, but the cost to the British economy will be great.
And that is what really matters and is really at stake at the moment: the Euro and the continent’s economy. The summit has not broken Britain’s position in Europe. Whether its steps are enough to save the continent’s economy from being broken is the big question. On that, the jury is very firmly still out.
So says 1066 and All That (Sellar and Yateman – a prewar forerunner of ‘Horrible Histories’) when summarising the Reformation.
It’s a good line and we can smile at the vanities of sixteenth century isolationism, knowing that today’s politicians, and people, are much more sophisticated. Nor do we regard the continent as cut off if there is fog in the English Channel.
During the early hours of 9th December (mark that date) David Cameron, we are told, played a blinder and ensured that 26 out of 27 countries in the EU were rescued from their fiscal and financial folly by …
I have said for months that it would be best to avoid arcane debates about treaty change altogether and if we had to proceed down that road, it would be best to do so in a way that did not create divisions in Europe.
The demands Britain made for safeguards, on which the Coalition Government was united, were modest and reasonable. They were safeguards for the single market, not just the UK.
There were no demands of repatriation of powers from the EU to Britain and no demands for a unilateral carve-out of UK financial services.
The first big subject at Prime Minister’s Questions this week was Europe. Tory MP Andrew Rosindell asked if David Cameron would show “bulldog spirit” at the forthcoming summit. Later, similar points came from various Tory Eurosceptic MPs, including the Father of the House, Sir Peter Tapsell. He is always heard with great respect, despite his long-winded, rather pompous and, in this case, halting mini-speeches which have barely inquisitive constructions stuck on the end of them.
Ed Miliband started on Europe as well, asking if Cameron would fulfil his promise that treaty change might give the opportunity to “repatriate powers”. The Prime …
Ten years on from the military intervention, more than 3 million girls in Afghanistan are now in school. With the Bonn conference on Monday, will the Prime Minister send a clear message that the rights of those girls should not be traded away in a false choice between women’s rights and security? The evidence shows that women’s involvement in post-conflict resolution is essential for stability.
The Prime Minister agreed:
All those of us who have been to Afghanistan and met women MPs and other leaders in that country who want to stand up for women’s
The focus of the Cameron v Miliband this week exchange was the new figure of one million unemployed young people. It started with a battle between the government’s Work Programme versus Labour’s Future Jobs Fund. Miliband blamed the Work Programme for increasing Youth Unemployment:
…in June, when the Work programme was introduced, 85,000 young people had been unemployed for more than six months; now, there are 133,000—a massive increase since he introduced the Work programme.
But Cameron countered with figures saying that:
The Work programme is helping 50% more people than the future jobs fund: it will help 120,000 young people this year,
By Stephen Tall
| Thu 17th November 2011 - 8:10 am
The intertwined topics of the economy and Europe has continued to dominate the political scene this week. But as Europhobic Tories continue to froth at the thought of England’s the UK’s retreat from its neighbours, Nick Clegg has maintained a decidedly mainstream approach, and attempted to shift the focus back from constitutional niceties to economic reality. Here’s how The Guardian reports Nick’s words:
Nick Clegg has clashed with David Cameron over Europe as he warned that only “populists, chauvinists and demagogues” would gain from protracted negotiations on treaty change. The Liberal Democrat deputy hit out the day after Cameron used
Prime Minister’s Question Time (PMQs) is often criticised as a bad advert for Parliament. It is confrontational and glib. – That particularly applies to the portion which is shown mostly on news programmes.
Anyone who is concerned about this should watch, or read the record of, the House of Commons Liaison Committee. Each quarter, it questions the Prime Minister for an hour and a half. The sessions are thoughtful, thorough and comprehensive. It is all very polite and earnest.
One could criticise the sessions for going to the other extreme of the style of PMQs. A good replacement for Horlicks, in other …
LibDem Julian Huppert started Prime Minister’s Questions with a zinger today. He said that jobs and growth depend on consumer confidence, and asked if, therefore, the PM thinks that telling 25 million people that they have no job security and could be fired tomorrow will help consumer confidence (this refers to the proposal from Tory businessman Adrian Beecroft). David Cameron had no answer but instead, as always, threw his briefing notes at the questioner (metaphorically speaking).
I should also mention, en passant, that Julian asked for suggestions for his first question via Twitter. Good man.
Today was the fiftieth anniversary of Prime Minister’s Questions. And it was a fairly typical session. As always, it was in two parts.
Part one: Lots of jeering, cheering, knockabout, winding-up and prepared lines exchanged between the PM and opposition leader.
Part Two: Generally hum-drum but important questions from various back-benchers, largely heard in earnest silence.
The bit that most people will see will be the short bit on the telly, which will be a few seconds of ya-boo politics. In itself, that is a good piece of democracy in that it highlights the weaknesses of the government and the opposition. The longer …
He still looks like a clever sixth former to me, but it is fair to say that Ed Miliband has cracked Prime Minister’s Questions. His performance this week was excellent.
“Just a bit late” was David Cameron’s description of Miliband’s raising of the Fox affair. It is easy to understand why Miliband did not raise the subject last week. Labour played a canny game with Dr Fox. They did not call for his resignation and at the last PMQs, Miliband did not ask directly about the issue. This allowed Dr Fox to swing in the media wind, without obvious Labour encouragement. …
Rarely can a ministerial resignation be less mourned than Liam Fox’s. An intriguing aspect of his fall is explained in my book The Clegg Coup. Senior Lib Dems and Tories told me repeatedly how Cameron and Fox loathed each other. Indeed, Cameron would often ring our Nick Harvey rather than his Fox to the extent that Harvey became known as “Cameron’s man at the MoD”.
“Fox sees himself as the prince across the water,” I was told. “He thinks Cameron never faced a proper challenge for the leadership because he was edged out in the first round by David Davis, whom he considers flaky. Liam is not going to blow his shot too early and it’s a good way off, but I do think he wants to challenge Cameron for the leadership.”
We’ve covered before on Lib Dem Voice the campaign by Lynne Featherstone and others to end the built-in sexism in the rules of Royal succession, whereby men automatically come ahead of women in the line of succession (‘Royal primogeniture’), a cause which has overwhelming public support.
One complication is that our monarch is also the monarch of other countries, which makes changes the rules a matter of both international diplomacy and domestic action. So good news today with David Cameron’s decision to write to 16 Commonwealth leaders about getting the rules changed.
From memory, this was the first time the Cameron/Miliband exchange centred wholly on the economy.
There was plenty of ammo for Miliband to fire at Cameron. Unemployment up to its highest for 15 years. Women’s unemployment at its highest since 1988. Youth unemployment at its highest since 1992. He started with a quote from David Cameron himself saying that “Unemployment will fall this year, next year and the year after”. (Bit of daft hostage to fortune that was.)
Cameron was well armed with all the programmes the government is starting: Welfare to Work programme, Welfare reform, Apprenticeships etc etc. And we have …
Take two people: one a successful female businesswoman and one a male Tory MP.
Then take two public statements: one calling female Cabinet members “an ugly bunch” and “I could not look at them”; the other calling for companies to be better at ending the male dominance of the boardroom.
The Chancellor has infuriated No. 10 and Cabinet colleagues by refusing to endorse a key component in the policy to boost renewable energy.
In an extraordinary move last week George Osborne was rebuked by David Cameron’s aides for failing to come on board for a key green policy.
At a meeting on Monday the prime minister’s most senior official, Jeremy Heywood, gave a dressing down to an Osborne adviser over the Chancellor’s failure to rubber stamp the new price that power companies will pay for renewable energy such as solar, wave and wind power.
David Allen A clear, credible, principled strategy from the Yorkists! Makes a welcome change.
Sadly, followed by twenty below-the-line posts, providing nearly twenty ve...
Simon McGrath so we get a permanant increase in costs for these subsidies based on ( alleged ) windfall profits. Its another big increase in spending -how is it to be paid ...
Peter Davies @Kira CollinsThat assumes we want to help people more with their energy bills than with all the other bills they may be struggling with. There is no reason why ...
Rob Heale Agree that we need to focus on strategy and have clearer messaging:-
1. We MUST prioritise membership recruitment in all we do, including PPB's, most leaflets...
Kira Collins Disappointed. The most obvious means of reducing energy bills is to remove VAT. Relatively straightforward to do and does not adversely impact on the attractive...
Add in another, far more recent, event – Brown winning out over Blair in keeping Britain out of the Euro (the closest Britain got to joining, for under Major that was never likely) – and Britain’s isolation after the last Euro summit is no sudden departure but rather a sudden, stark reminder of the quieter trends that have long been going on. The summit did not create those trends, however sharply it illustrated them.
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The pine martens of Shropshire
The shame of Liverpool Labour councillors taking their allowances but not turning up to do the work
Should Labour reconsider the Brexit red lines?
David Allen 
Simon McGrath 
Peter Davies 
Rob Heale 
Kira Collins 