The only way is out...

The UK has been requested by the EU Commission to pay welfare to all EU nationals, which could cost us up to £2.5bn. So much for the Coalition’s welfare reforms: as our elected government squeezes British nationals and forces the indolent into work, our unelected government obliges us to fork out for ‘benefit tourists’, who will readily find British benefits to be vastly more beneficial than those of Latvia, Estonia, Poland, Hungary... writes Cranmer over an extraordinary directive from the EU.

He points out that the Coalition's record on Europe is not encouraging... So, before you get caught up in revived hopes of the rise of Conservative Euroscepticism, please remember that we’re in a coalition with the most rabidly Europhile party in Britain, and that it has to last until 2015. Please remember that last year, a European Court judgement forced David Cameron to agree to allow prisoners to vote. Please remember that there has been no promised examination of the Working Time Directive, despite its disruptive effects on the NHS. Please remember that despite promises to decimate (at least) red tape, EU regulations keep pouring in, strangling British businesses. Please remember that the Prime Minister agreed to a 2.9 per cent increase in our EU contributions, despite promising to Parliament and the Country that there would be none. Please remember that one of his first acts was to opt in to the ‘European Investigation Order’ which obliges British police forces to act on the orders of other EU police forces, with or without primary evidence, and even for actions which are not a criminal act in the UK. Ouch.

I listened to Tim Farron, President of the Liberal Democrats, on QuestionTime last night being asked why we should remain part of the EU. He answered that next week, 26 delegates from all the different EU countries will sit round a table to discuss sheep-tagging. 30 years ago, those same people would be pointing nuclear weapons at each other.

Mr Farron should read Fukuyama. It is Liberal Democracy that has ended not just wars, but the ideological pre-cursors - fascism, communism and dictatorships - that first divided, then murdered and finally enslaved countless millions of Europeans in the twentieth century.

The EU meanwhile, pays 26 men more than £100,000 a year each to sit around a table, in a glass palace in Brussels, to decide what an entire continent should do on sheep-tagging. Important work? Democratic? No Mr Farron. It is not even necessary.

The only way is out.

Cable on Conservatives...

Ruthless, calculating and very tribal is how Vince Cable describes the Conservative party in an interview for Radio 4 this morning which immediately makes headline news for all the wrong reasons. If instead he had described the party as soft, woolly and disorganised, what do you imagine the reaction would have been? You just can't win...

The wisdom of Fraser Nelson

Fraser Nelson talking about Conservatism, from a piece suggesting David Cameron is just too nice for his own good. What irony?


'People offer various definitions of right and left. Mine is that to be Conservative is to declare faith not in dogma, but in mankind. To have faith in the wisdom and genius of the British public, and believe that the best route to success is to em

power the many. The 'Big Society' idea - a powerful agenda, disguised by a criminally stupid name.


To be Labour is to be angry, angry about society: leftism starts with a list of Bad People who are to be kept in check. The Old Labour way is to believe that Britain is best if power (and about half the money people earn) is placed with an enlightened elite.

Conservatives want to take power away from government, and give it to the people, whom they trust.'

Covenants, boarders & the military

Tory plan to axe school fees 'breaks the military covenant' reads the Telegraph headline.

For many years the children of British servicemen have been able to go to private boarding schools through something called the boarding school allowance. This is a fund designed to pay part of the cost of private school fees, which service personnel on fairly meagre salaries would otherwise be unable to afford. The fund provides around £180 million a year for 7,400 military children. £5,621 is allowed per term, with the remainder - usually around £4000 after including uniforms, books & sundry school trips - being paid from regular servicemen's pay. 58% of recipients are officers, 42% soldiers.

It is paid because military units - and hence the families which staff, support and maintain them - are posted to new jobs every two years throughout their military service. More frequently if wars and disputes like Northern Ireland, Kosovo, Afghanistan or Iraq become the norm.

Why is it considered part of the military covenant? Because moving servicemen's children every two years - or even less - from school to school as families rotate around military bases across the world is completely incompatible with good education. Helping to provide a place at a UK based boarding school allows those children the stability and long term educational support that is necessary.

More than that, many military families provide their professionalism and commitment to public service - and let us not forget what a service they provide in places like Helmand, Goose Green or the streets of Belfast - precisely because their children's education is additionally provided. It could hardly be for the pay. That is why the government's move to stop the boarding school allowance for service families is considered a breach of the military covenant. 

As the son of a young army Captain posted to Bielefeld in 1965, who was able to attend just two schools from the age of seven to eighteen, I am living proof the system works.

Labour spin

Good piece from Tim Montgomery in today's Guardian on Labour's sloppy caricature of Conservatism. He writes, 'The idea that Conservatives want to take Britain back to a world of the Victorian workhouse was espoused by a Labour MP in yesterday's Mirror. Tristram Hunt is supposed to be one of Labour's bright new prospects and a distinguished historian. God help Ed Miliband if he is typical. Hunt abandoned any pretence of intellectual engagement with the coalition's deficit reduction arguments and suggested the Conservatives wanted to take Britain back to a Dickensian horror house. His extraordinary article talked of starving people surviving on gruel, rotten bones and putrid horseflesh.'

Coalition Pensions

I have never understood why somebody - usually women bringing up children, so probably the most socially useful activity possible - should be penalised for perhaps thirty years in their retirement because they were unable to contribute more in National Insurance contributions during their working lifetime.

Reports today suggest the coalition is considering a universal pension at an increased level to the ninety seven-odd pounds per week currently paid to a single pensioner.

Although at an early stage, and unlikely to be introduced until after the next election, this is an initiative we should applaud. Along with a tapering of such pensions for anyone earning more than £44,000 in their retirement. £97 per week is around £5000 annually - pretty modest really.

Sorry Fred 'the shred' Goodwin, you're just going to have to make do with that £703,000.

Managing expectations

What a truly extraordinary performance in managing expectations from the Coalition government.

Labour completely wrong-footed after months of dire warnings of the greatest cuts for a century. Alan Johnson looking as if he delivered the wrong script. Ed Balls and Douglas Alexander desperately defending - yes defending Labour's toxic legacy - not attacking the cuts of more than £80bn in addition to those already announced in the Coalition's emergency budget in July.

And having done so, able to claim that at an overall reduction of 19%, is even less than Labour proposed cutting front line services in their election manifesto. Quite extraordinary.

And to think they called him 'boy George' for his naivety. How times change.

Listen children...

35 of the country's most influential and important businessmen running the largest companies in the land come out to support George Osborne's deficit cuts two days before being announced. Totally planned, choreographed and PR'd by Conservative Central Office. Do we really need to be treated like children?

Coalition, compromise & wish-lists

Interesting discussion on the Guardian's Politics Weekly podcast today - given that coalition government is likely to become more common under AV and other more proportional systems, should party manifesto's be merely wish-lists? To be used only to select policies that will withstand the compromises inherent in coalition politics?

The conscience of Lord Ashcroft

Lord Ashcroft pontificates on why the Conservatives did not quite conquer the mountain of our electoral system at the last attempt.

Has he considered that the discovery of Ashcroft's non dom status before the election - and the constant references at PMQ's and other parliamentary business in the few short weeks that followed - might have impacted on the result?

Happy 100 days

Good news if Iain Martin is to be believed - a tapered incentive back into work for millions of welfare dependents. No doubt the Sunday's will be full of it. All we need now is a realistic and effective welfare to work program - just like Cameron promised at last year's conference. Remember that? Seems like an age now...

It coincides with the first 100 days of the coalition government with articles all over the media. A more radical opening is hard to imagine. And there's plenty more promised - a patient-led NHS (albeit through GP's), decentralisation of local government, a comprehensive defence review and voting reform of both houses, to mention just a few.

But amongst such progress, I still have doubts over a flatlining economy - and bank lending, not government spending, remains at the heart of my doubts.

Instead of whining over bonuses, Vince Cable should be introducing new legislation offering 'narrow' banking licences to new entrants to the retail banking market. And reforming a swathe of (largely EU inspired) business regulations and centralised bureaucracy to free up and stimulate new business generation.

100 days Post Terror

100 days of Dave does not sound an inspiring title. But is an excellent piece from Tim Montgomery in the New Statesman.


He points out a growing number of reform programs the coalition has surprised us with, confirming their revolutionary fervour - shelving the prison building program, welfare dependency reform and the NHS re-organisation of strategic and area health authorities. Reforms to schools, policing and local government were well anticipated.

But it is the personal that for me features so prominently in Tim's assessment. The courage so evident in constructing a 'change alliance'. The deep and seamless bonding of two distinct political traditions, expressed through the prism of David Laws resignation. And the sheer delight that appears to accompany every decision the coalition makes. In one word, trust.

One more heave, Mr Heffer

I may have enjoyed one expression from Simon Heffer, but I can't think of a writer who's made me more angry over the past four years.


For me, Heffer represents everything that is wrong and unacceptable with the Conservative party. He and his followers are the reason why - until Cameron became leader in 2005 - I had been unable to vote in a general election since John Major in 1997. The last honest and decent politician who handed over a golden legacy for the incoming Labour administration to destroy.



Heffer it seemed to me, delighted in attacking Cameron - and particularly shadow Chancellor George Osborne - for daring to question the old orthodoxy of Thatcherite shibboleths that the electorate had so convincingly rejected many years before.



Even in today's paper, Heffer claims Cameron "...believes in nothing except remaining Prime Minister" despite initiating the most fundamental reforms to education, health, voting, policing, prisons and welfare for a generation. All within the first 11 weeks of a coalition government which is additionally committed to more than halving the deficit during its lifetime, left by Labour for future generations to pay.



He suggests the only people with anything important to say "...are to be found on the Right of the Conservative Party and the Left of the Liberal Democrats." Well, they may form an audience for Mr Heffer - though I doubt Simon Hughes would agree - but they hardly seem a willing coalition with which to win elections.


It just seems to me that Mr Heffer's attitude - like that of the European Union - is that the electorate seems to have got it wrong. And they need to be made to vote again and again and again. Until they get it right. Or should that be Right.

Packing the electorate

Looks like we're nearly at save the LibDem's time. 55% of Conservative voters now accept the need for an electoral pact. Certainly the Conservative Whigs owe a great deal to the Liberals - if not the Democrats.

Personally I'm amazed at the plummeting electoral fortunes of a junior partner which has managed to introduce quite so many manifesto commitments within weeks of coming to power - far more than Blair's 1997 steroidally obsessed regime. An electoral pact may well become necessary.

But probably only once a referendum on AV has been lost...

Calmly Radical

The summer recess is here and politics is going away on holiday.

'Better than the last lot' was Jeff Randal's verdict. Not difficult really - and what a relief after the forces of anger, hatred and deceit finally left the stage.

So how have they done? Radical, that's for sure.

Eight short weeks into a government program scrambled together whilst assembling the first national coalition in half a century, and the government has embarked on the most radical reform program possible: halving Labours profligate borrowing, deep reforms in welfare, education, the NHS, policing, prisons, and immigration as well as constitutional changes the like of which we have not seen since women's suffrage in the 1920's.

And Labour always told us Cameron was policy light. Naughty Labour.

The most obvious change though has been in attitude. A quiet determination to apply real solutions to pressing problems, with calm and curtesy. None of the frenzy that characterised NewLabour and its spin machine.

And yet the big loser - at least in polling terms - appear to be the Liberal Democrats. The latest polls show them languishing at around 15%. So what, in policy terms, did the LibDems actually secure?

They agreed and are implementing the necessary deficit reductions from their own manifesto. They have secured constitutional reform including AV with a referendum set for 5th May next year. They have secured - through Michael Gove's educational reforms - the 'pupil premium' of their manifesto. They are set to take out a tier of buraucracy - strategic health authorities - from the NHS as outlined in their manifesto. They have secured a prison reform program that was widely criticised in the leader's debates during the election campaign. And perhaps most significantly, the tax threashold was increased towards their much publicised objective of £10,000 in George Osborne's emergency budget. Not a bad haul for a party providing just 59 of the 365 coalition MP's.