Guardian: Foxhunting ban likely to remain thanks to new generation of Tory MPs

Many new Conservative MPs say they'll vote with Labour to prevent repeal of 2004 Hunting Act

The election of a new generation of Conservative MPs opposed to bloodsports is likely to block attempts to repeal the ban on foxhunting with hounds, according to members of the latest Commons intake. ...

The ban on hunting foxes with hounds was one of the most contentious pieces of legislation introduced by the Labour government. It took up 600 hours of parliamentary time. In 2002, the Countryside Alliance organised a mass demonstration in support of hunting that brought 400,000 protesters onto the streets – the capital's largest until the anti-Iraq war protest. ...

Mike Weatherley, the MP for Hove and Portslade, is one of around 20 new Conservative MPs who are in favour of retaining the 2004 Hunting Act, which outlaws hunting with dogs. "The likelihood is that the ban will stay," he told the Guardian. "I think there's enough of us to ensure that the ban will remain. A lot of people who decided not to vote Conservative will be surprised to find that it's Conservatives who will stop it [being repealed].

A neighbouring new Tory MP, Simon Kirby, who represents Brighton Kemptown and Peacehaven, issued a statement earlier this month declaring: "It remains my absolute commitment that I will not vote to repeal the ban on hunting".

Speaks for itself as regards a shift in Tory thinking - at least in Parliament. Read the full article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/oct/28/countryside-alliance-conservatives-foxhunting

PMQs: Ed Miliband urged to use good 'cheer lines'

From BBC News Online today [full article]:

Ed Miliband should use memorable "cheer lines" at prime minister's questions to ensure coverage on TV news bulletins, leaked advice to Labour's leader says.

A memo to Mr Miliband on what to do at the weekly session, seen by The Times, urges him to ask simple questions to make PM David Cameron look "evasive". It also stresses the importance of body language and enjoying the encounter.

Mr Cameron seized on it at Wednesday's session, saying his rival had "a plan for PMQs but no plan for the economy".

Mr Miliband faced the prime minister across the despatch box for the third time on Wednesday in an exchange dominated by the government's proposed reforms to housing benefit.

Read the whole BBC article - The Times' original publication of the leak is hidden behind their pay-for-access firewall - as an insight for Unit 2 into Prime Minister's Questions, parliamentary performance and the high profile of the Prime Minister as the focus of the executive branch of government.

Steve Richards: Just as in the Eighties, ideology is driving the spending cuts

Steve Richards, chief political commentator at The Independent and presenter of Radio 4'sWeek in Westminster makes the case in his newspaper today that we are experiencing a return to ideology-driven political choices, reminiscent of Thatcher's Britain of the 1980s:

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/steve-richards/steve-richards-just-as-in-the-eighties-ideology-is-driving-the-spending-cuts-2116277.html

Choices are being made on the basis of how politicians view the state - as an instrument that can be benevolent, or stifling

It's a lengthy piece of commentary—definitely worth reading... One highlight:

In the 1990s Tony Blair attempted to de-politicise politics by arguing that what works is all that matters. What works is what matters, but the debate about how that comes about is based unavoidably on conflicting values. The Coalition's wariness of admitting it is an ideological administration rooted on the right and shaped by the 1980s shows how Blairite de-politicisation has made its mark.

But the values are deeply held. Cameron/Osborne/Clegg laid out their beliefs very clearly in advance of the election. In several speeches Clegg declared that the state was necessary to fund public services such as health and education, but after that government should "back off". Privately he told colleagues that the social democratic experiment had failed. He even told some of the social democrats in his party, who now realise he meant it. Cameron's position was clear from the start of his leadership when he said that there was such a thing as society, but it is not the same as the state.

Why the Tories Didn't Win in 2010 (and may not in 2015)

Tim Bale is Professor of Politics at the University of Sussex. His book The Conservative Party: From Thatcher to Cameron is a model of contemporary history. In a short article ("Cometh the Hour") in Parliamentary Brief this month, Prof. Bale has produced a convenient encapsulation of what he believed happened (or failed to happen!) at the 2010 election:

http://www.parliamentarybrief.com/2010/10/cometh-the-hour-#all

Three paragraphs reveal the thrust of his analysis:

The key task facing Cameron when he took over in late 2005 was reassuring voters that the Conservatives could be trusted on welfare and public services.  All the market research suggested that this was the sine qua non — a necessary if not a sufficient condition — of a return to office … Just as important were the signals sent out to people working in the public sector — and not just those in the supposedly sacred ‘front line’– that the party no longer regarded them as a waste of time and taxes.

When the global financial crisis hit and Britain’s budget deficit ballooned, however, this task remained unfinished and work on it practically ceased.  Gambling on the fact that they would be given brownie points for honesty, and believing that, as the most likely next government, they should start softening up the public for inevitable spending reductions, the Tories switched from reassurance to rhetoric about the age of austerity.

This, far more than an admittedly lacklustre campaign, was what did for them at the election: Labour may have been a busted flush but it was still able to scare enough voters about the Conservative’s intentions to deny them an overall majority.

It's worth reading the entire article, particularly if you're about to trawl through Conservative Party policies and ideas (Edexcel Unit 1)... If nothing else, Professor Bale believes the imminent Comprehensive Spending Review will reveal once and for all what manner of Tory Cameron really is!

Unit 2 Judiciary: Lest ye be judged (Bagehot)

Bagehot in The Economist today has an extremely useful and comprehensive article on the increasing importance of the Judiciary within the UK, given increasing distrust in elected politicians [link]. Full text follows:

“SOMEONE must be trusted. Let it be the judges.” The words of Lord Denning, a great if flawed judge, were controversial when he uttered them 30 years ago. Back in 1980, Lord Denning was speaking defensively: admirers and foes saw the judiciary as the Establishment in ermine. The criminal justice system was about to enter years of agony and wrenching change as police wrongdoing was exposed, especially in the obtaining of confessions, and big terrorist convictions were overturned. But his injunction now looks rather prescient.

Today, answering Lord Denning’s plea three decades late, a country drowning in distrust has fastened onto the judiciary and its works as a source of redress. After every calamity—whether a terrorist attack, a police shooting, killings in Iraq or a royal death—the clamour rises for inquiries headed by a judge, with the power to quiz witnesses under oath.

Inquiries of one sort or another seem to be everywhere. On October 11th Britain’s press covered the opening of an inquest into the London bus and Tube bombings of July 7th 2005. The bomb attacks have been probed in a criminal trial and parliamentary investigations. But bereaved families want the inquest—headed by a High Court judge—to examine whether the domestic security service, MI5, could have prevented the attacks, and whether emergency services were slow to respond.

On the same day the press reported fresh demands for a public inquiry into the killing of six British military policemen in Iraq in 2003, after a trial of alleged perpetrators collapsed in Baghdad. Interviewed by a newspaper, a Democratic Unionist MP from Northern Ireland appeared to launch an inquiries bidding war. Britain had spent £200m ($320m) on the 12-year Saville Inquiry into the 1972 “Bloody Sunday” shootings of protesters by British paratroops in Londonderry, he claimed, yet could not afford “justice” for army families. On October 7th an inquest jury in London found that police had lawfully killed a barrister as he fired a shotgun from the window of his flat, but in an extended “narrative verdict” said officers had given insufficient weight to the dead man’s alcoholism. Press coverage was extensive but muted, after the widow stated that she respected the verdict.

Meanwhile, a formal inquiry into the Iraq war (the fifth by some counts) that began in July 2009 is continuing, headed by a retired Whitehall mandarin, Sir John Chilcot. Another, headed by Sir Peter Gibson, a former judge, will soon probe alleged collusion between British spooks and foreign torturers.

This is superficially puzzling. After all, by education, culture and habit, most judges are members of Britain’s despised, mistrusted ruling elite. Yet their reputation has rarely been higher.

Voters killing the thing they love

People “want to know what happened”, suggests Michael Mansfield, a barrister and veteran of high-profile inquiries and inquests. What they seek is not retribution but for those in authority to be “brought to book” by legal questioning. The bereaved want lessons learned, giving some meaning to their loss. And the public has no faith in the House of Commons—a noisy, jeering pit of partisan barracking, further undermined by the parliamentary-expenses scandals—as a forum for establishing truth. Simultaneously, he says, there has been “a resurrection of faith” in the judiciary, notably after judges in the House of Lords condemned moves by the previous government to detain or control terror suspects without charge, or on the basis of secret evidence.

Mr Mansfield is a self-described “radical lawyer”, unloved on the right. But his analysis is echoed by a senior Conservative politician, who recalls when judges were seen as “lions under the throne”: upholders of the system. Now, he says, judges are seen as “upholders of the rule of law”, curbing an over-mighty state.

Is today’s inquiry mania sustainable? There are technical reasons why judges seem to be everywhere. Above all, the 1998 Human Rights Act enshrined the “right to life”—from Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights—into domestic law. That has transformed inquests, which must now consider not just who died, where and when, but “how” in its broadest sense. That may include deciding if public-policy lessons can be drawn from a death. The quality of inquests used to be hit and miss, with local lawyers and doctors serving as coroners. Now, when a death has an “Article 2 dimension”, a high court judge is often drafted in as coroner, as in the July 7th terror inquest. What is more, a growing number of claimants now seek—and obtain—judicial reviews of decisions made by public bodies, with judges asked to ponder everything from terrorist control orders to planning decisions.

Judges know their prominence carries risks. They are partly filling a vacuum created by the vertiginous fall of elected politicians from grace. Just 13% of respondents trusted politicians to tell the truth in a 2009 survey by Ipsos MORI (below even journalists). Judges were trusted by 80%. British judges are appointed, not elected, and public trust is strongly bound up with their political independence. Lord Carlile, a Liberal Democrat peer and the government’s independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, worries that judges’ findings are cheered when they chime with public opinion, but when they do not—as with the Hutton Inquiry into the death of the government weapons expert David Kelly—they are denounced as a “whitewash”. And the painful truth is that some decisions are properly taken by members of an elected executive. Senior judges are queasy about being asked to review terrorist control orders, for example.

The public’s yearning for judicial resolution of every crisis risks dragging judges close to the realm of politics. Lord Denning was right: someone must be trusted. If judges are not, who might take their place?

Carefully read, understood and discussed, this one article should allow AS students to:

• Outline the concept of Judicial Review
• Identify what constitutes a public inquiry and provide three recent examples
• Give a reason for the increased profile of the judiciary
• Explain how judges are appointed, and offer a view on whether the system needs modification
• Distinguish between judicial independence and judicial neutrality (key concepts)
• Provide a definition of the Rule of Law
• Explain the significance of Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR)
• Discuss whether judges effectively protect civil liberties

Essential reading I would suggest....! (So read it!)

Lord Young on the Thatcher Legacy

Nick Clegg defends five-year fixed-term parliaments

Deputy PM says five-year terms would give governments four years 'to get on and do difficult things'

Nick Clegg has defended plans for fixed-term five-year parliaments, saying a four-year parliament would not give an administration time to govern in the national interest.

Giving evidence to the Lords constitution committee, he said governments tended to be "hamstrung and paralysed" for at least a year before a general election, so a five-year term would allow four years to "get on and do difficult things".

Clegg said: "It's a combination of providing a length of time with which people are familiar and which allows governments at least maybe four of those five years ... to get on with governing properly for the benefit of the country, combined with taking away from the executive this ability to capriciously time the election for nothing more than political self-interest."

Source: Guardian Unlimited (Wed 13/10/2010)

Vince Cable ditches graduate tax option for England

BBC Online's headline this morning - sounds like good news, no....?

Well, "no!" may be the definitive answer for many current and future university students (including yourselves!)

Whilst Vince Cable (pictured right) has just written to LibDem and Conservative party members to rule out a graduate tax, the Business Secretary has certainly not ruled out a "progressive" element within the final fees package. That final fees package is widely thought to include more than doubling current fees of £3,290 per annum to £7,000 or more. Moreover, the repayments on loans to cover these fees are set to be charged at a higher interest rate than at present - with the expectation that high-earning graduates could be charged at an even higher interest rate:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-11507537

The final paragraphs of the article (do read it all!) neatly summarise the implications for coalition party policies and ideas:

...increasing fees threatens to be a major problem for the Liberal Democrats, who made their opposition to higher fees a flagship election issue.

It will also raise sensitivities for the Conservatives of another squeeze on the middle classes, with the prospect of a three-year degree costing £21,000 or more, plus higher interest repayments on student debt.

I would expect to see more challenges to traditional party policies in the coming weeks and the publication of the Spending Review. Be ready during the October Half Term holiday to dedicate some time to reading the media about these matters....

Prime Ministers I Have Known...

Parliamentary sketchwriter Simon Hoggart has met every British prime minister since Harold Macmillan. And each has, without fail, proved to have their own idiosyncratic foibles, as he recalls in these extracts from his new book, A Long Lunch. Hoggart's home publication, The Guardian, has some amusing extracts...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/oct/08/prime-ministers-i-have-known

Each provides additional insights into the denizens of Number Ten Downing Street, capturing the personalities and leadership styles of past British leaders.

Telegraph: Top 100 most influential Right-wingers

The Telegraph has a very useful Top 100 style presentation on whom they perceive to be the "most inluenntial Right-wingers" in UK politics, with some surprising (or maybe not so surprising!) inclusions:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/conservative/8044285/Top-100-most-influential-Right-wingers-25-1.html

(The link will take you to numbers 25-1, but look for further links on the page itself to see the rest of the list).

Cameron's First Big Mistake? : Child Benefits Cuts for the Middle Classes

The Guardian leads today with reports from the Conservative Party Conference that David Cameron's government could have made its first wrong step with Conservative 'swing' voters...

David Cameron 'sorry' child benefit cut was not in Tory manifesto
Prime minister battles to calm Conservative nerves amid fears government has made first big mistake

Every Prime Minister has their first error of judgement that 'ends the honeymoon' with their core voters... Tony Blair had tobacco sponsorship in Formula One, Gordon Brown had the 10p tax—now it could be that David Cameron has found his! Trouble is, with the results of the Spending Review just around the corner, he could find a few more yet....

Identikit leaders?

What exactly are the differences between the three main party leaders? That's the question the Guardian attempts to answer (tongue slightly in cheek) in today's edition. Now that Ed Miliband has joined the club, Patrick Barkham notes that all three parties are led by Oxbridge-educated white men in their 40s who are all former advisers. The article takes a closer look at their credentials and tries to tell them apart:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/oct/01/ed-miliband-david-cameron-nick-clegg

Worth a read, both as general background, for party policies in Unit 1 and for insights into leadership style (Executive, Unit 2).