James Kirkup

Remember the huskies? Lovely things, all fluffy and innocent, with wide eyes and sleek, shiny coats. Not unlike the young Cameroons at the dawn of the Age of Dave, in fact. What a happy, innocent time that was.

Fast forward to the grim days of 2010. After some long days and some political battles, the Cameroons, bless them, are looking less fluffy and innocent. Dave’s pelt is thinning alarmingly too.

The politics have changed as well. No one is keen to say so in public, but the environment, so important to the first phase of the Cameron project, has faded from the Tory agenda. As the contest with Labour has got tougher, the Tory message has been boiled down to familiar stuff, as Conservatives calculate that voters are frankly less bothered about polar bears than they are about jobs and crime. Privately, even some Cameron believers are… Read More

Quick plug for the clever folk at Reform, who have created a couple of fun gizmos before the Budget next week.

One of their toys allows you to design your own tax system. Another, possibly more likely to get the rage flowing, shows you how much more tax you’re paying now compared to a decade ago.

Have a look here for the calculators.

Enjoy.

The dog days continue. The House of Commons packed up for the day today at 4.08pm.

Having shown their faces for PMQs, a fair few MPs are now leaving Westminster again, heading back to their constituencies to get on with their still-undeclared election campaigns.

In the words of one Labour whip: “I don’t know why we’re bothering. There’s **** all going on here.”

Quite.

Yes, you read that right.

Gordon Brown has just admitted he was wrong to claim, in the House of Commons and in evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry, that defence spending rose in real terms every year under Labour.

Mr Brown told the Commons: “I do accept that in one or two years, defence expenditure did not rise in real terms.”

He is now writing to Sir John Chilcot to amend his evidence, apparently.

More on this later, but initial thoughts are that this is a big win for David Cameron and Liam Fox who raised this last week in the Commons.

Update: Plaudits also to Cathy Newman at Channel Four, whose dissection of Mr Brown’s claims last week helped bring Mr Brown to this rare admission of error.

Once upon a time in a political galaxy that feels far, far away, a youngish man called David Cameron was reported to have declared: “I am the heir to Blair.”

The quote, still disputed, has haunted Mr Cameron ever since, irritating right-wing Conservative MPs and voters for whom it symbolises all that is wrong wrong with the Cameron project.

For a good while, right-wing grumbles about Mr Cameron were muted by his ability to deliver solid opinion poll leads. That ability has been questioned lately, and there is some grumbling in the Tory undergrowth.

Against that background, I note with interest the following remarks by Michael Gove, the shadow schools secretary and key member of the Cameron project.

In a speech today on Labour’s links with the Unite trade union, Mr Gove argued that New Labour modernisers are deserting the party and Labour is ceding the political centre, retreating to it… Read More

I’m confused.

Every time I look at the Unite website, it tells me the union has “almost 2 million members”. Or it says Unite is “2 million strong – Britain’s biggest union”.

But according to the union’s own figures, it had 1,635,483 members at the end of 2008.*

And of them, only 1,465,260 of were actually paying their membership fees.

Indeed, a total of 146,399 people are listed as Unite members despite the fact that the union doesn’t have a valid home address for them.

Surely, it would be more accurate for Unite to describe itself as having “almost 1.5 million members” or as “1.5 million strong”?

It’s not as if the union’s leadership are unaware of the situation here. This document, signed by Tony Woodley and Derek Simpson, shows that an internal “database cleansing” exercise during 2008 revealed that more than 300,000 of the union’s “members” had either been… Read More

Another week, another ominous sign from the financial world. Moody’s has said the UK, in common with the US, is sliding closer to the edge of AAA status. The “‘distance-to- downgrade’ has substantially diminished”.

(Click here to read the comprehensive write-up on this from Bloomberg)

For me, the most striking aspect of the Moody’s analysis is its forecasts for how much HMG will have to spend servicing its debts.

According to Moody’s, the UK will spend 7 percent of tax revenue on debt interest this year, and 9 percent in 2013. At worst, debt interest will eat up almost 12 percent of revenues.

Financially, that’s unnerving: some market folk reckon that over the 10 percent mark, the agencies get twitchy and start thinking in earnest about a downgrade. That’s gazing into the abyss stuff.

And politically, does it matter? This is technical,… Read More

Yesterday, I asked Gordon Brown if he’d like to rule out a “giveaway Budget” on March 24 and commit himself to spending any spare Treasury cash to paying off the deficit. He declined, as reported here.

Today, on BBC2’s Politics Show, Andrew Neil asked a very similar question of Liam Byrne, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury.

Mr Byrne replied: “I can tell you this is not going to be a big give-away Budget.”

A trip back to the financial world this week has crystallised a feeling that’s been nagging at me for a few days: the Conservatives are in trouble on the economy.

After Gordon Brown’s appearance at Reuters’ Canary Wharf base on Thursday, I spoke to a City type who also attended a similar event last week with George Osborne, David Cameron and Kenneth Clarke last week. For all the undoubted anxieties in the City about Labour’s (lack of) fiscal plans and all the doubts about Mr Brown’s own agenda, my financial friend was clear about which presentation he found more credible.

“Whatever you think of it, Brown looks like he’s offering a clear message. I can’t say that for the Conservatives,” he said. It was not an unusual view in such company.

Rewind to last autumn. Mr Osborne was on top form, effectively setting the economic agenda, just has he… Read More

An angry, shouty PMQs today, with lots of the anger and shouting over matters military.

More on this later, but worth noting Gordon Brown’s claims that commanders themselves have approved the equipment and vehicles being used in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He said:

“Before any operation is carried out, we ask the people who are in charge if they have the equipment to undertake the operation.”

And:

“Every time the Armed Forces go into action, I ask the commanders for an assurance they have the equipment they need.”

Now Read Thomas Harding’s full report of the inquest into the deaths of four British soldiers in a Snatch Land Rover in Afghanistan in 2006.

Pay particular attention to this paragraph:

The inquest heard that the commander of the four soldiers had requested a replacement for their Snatch Land Rover but was refused due to equipment shortages.