They Blog For You

The political elite in SW1 are out of touch with the public on law and order, according to the Sunday Telegraph.  In a poll commissioned by Lord Ashcroft, 47 percent of voters think that no party has the right approach. [...]

One of the perils of politicians is that no sooner have they made a grand pronouncement on the sweep of history, as they perceive it, than events immediately conspire to prove that they had totally misread the runes and that the opposite is true.   That seems the fate of David Miliband [...]

It's difficult to find words to express your feelings when you watch the TV pictures of the tsunami wave and its continuing aftermath. Seeing the giant wave inexorably moving towards buildings and vehicles, knowing that people will be about to be swept up in its power, is a horrible sight. [...]

Whilst Big Society may be a vacuous slogan, Cameron’s commitment to deconstruct the State, as he told us explicitly two weeks ago, is very real.   Following hard on the dismantling of the NHS, he made clear that there would be no public service, with the sole exception of national security [...]

I've a guest piece on Left Foot Forward this morning on the theme of defence procurement.  Having big corporate interests hijacking public policy is not in the interests of either the centre left or right.  Yet I fear that corporatism is back in vogue - in Whitehall, in domestic [...]

                Inflation is well set around the world. At least most commentators now recognise this, and have stepped away from telling us the main  threat was deflation. The large increases in food prices which lax money policy has triggered have had one unexpected result – it has helped fuel the [...]

Not for the first time the Lockerbie narrative is being distorted out of all recognition for political ends, first by the US-UK governments in the 1990s, then by the UK Government and the Scottish Executive in 2009, and now by Cameron in his statement to the Commons yesterday.   Cameron’s line was that [...]

Great news! Wilbury Primary School has been awarded £10,000 from the Big Lottery Fund. The school will use the money to run an afterschool dance club and will give priority to getting pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds involved. It is often these kids who miss out on opportunities like sports clubs, [...]

Cameron clinging to Coulson as his media fixer to the last possible moment, well beyond the point when his departure was inevitable, does say something about Cameron’s judgement since he behaved in exactly the same way over Michael Ashcroft, the ex-patriate from Belize who bought up the Tory party.   Virtually [...]

This week the economic announcements are likely to show that unemployment is beginning to rise sharply, inflation too is edging up (even before the VAT hike kicks in), and consumer spending portends a further economic slowdown.   That might of course be explained as temporary but necessary pain before things get [...]

At last Labour is confronting the Tory canard that the current austerity is all the fault of the mess that the last Labour Government left behind.   It has been the success of Tory propagandists in switching a bankers-driven financial collapse into (i) a Labour Government-caused train crash and (ii) Labour over-spending [...]

A new statistic just revealed: what should a chief executive earn?   A Joseph Rowntree trust survey has found that two-thirds of the population believe that a CEO shouldn’t take home more than half a million a year (that’s 21 times the average national income).   What they actually take home has also [...]

Three days after the General Election on May 9th, Alistair Darling agreed to make Britain part of the European stabilisation mechanism at the ECOFIN meeting.  But because the deal was negotiated after polling day, according to the FT "Mr Darling consulted George Osborne, who succeeded him as chancellor, before committing Britain to [...]

Nick Clegg claims in the FT that the new EU treaty has no direct bearing on the UK.Do you suppose Mr Clegg has read the small print of the European Council report, on which any future draft of the new treaty will draw? Paragraph 34 says there's to be [...]

Next year an executive will be paid £100 million – a year.   It’s a fairly certain bet when this year someone called Bart Becht, the boss of the consumer goods company, Reckitt Benckiser, is being paid £92,596,160.   That works out at £1,780,695 – a week.   Assuming he works a 70 [...]

It feels like the night before Waterlo awaiting the fate to come, except that then we won while this time we’re going to be losers, big losers.   The relentless drumbeat of good news this week was unmistakeably designed to soften the landing for the thuds to fall next Wednesday. [...]

The Shadow Cabinet results are very revealing, on several counts.   Out of the 19 elected members, 10 voted for David Miliband, and only 3 or 4 voted for Ed.   It is packed with the Blairite Tendency, several of the militant brand, and their influence is not to be under-estimated.   Even [...]

I have been reading Michael Ashcroft’s account of the work he and his team did in the marginal seats in the run up to 2010 election. It is not much like the press accounts [...]

According to the FT, Francis Maude wants to change the public procurement process. He’d like suppliers to deal with central government as a whole, rather than with individual departments. We urgently need to ensure that we get better value for money from suppliers. But is scaling up the procurement process through [...]

GIVEN that two years ago I entered the Telegraph‘s 100 Most Influential Left Wingers list at number 99, and that I have since then been sacked as a minister, I’m as chuffed as a Chilean miner with a secret stash of Mars Bars to have reached the number 29 position [...]