May 2013
5 posts
8 tags
Let's all learn to love the Eurovision Song...
Matthew Plummer 9.55am
I love the Eurovision Song Contest. Tragically for me it isn’t some sort of ironic interest based on poking fun at the funny hats, weird beards and implausible busts – I actually have the wretched thing in my diary and look forward to it each year, although up until now it’s been something of a secret shame.
The Swedes are to blame. In 2006 I lived in...
16 tags
Only by calming down shall EU rebels get what they...
Nik Darlington 9.54am
Yesterday on these pages, Giles questioned whether the Tory party truly wants to resist the UKIP surge, or whether the Tory party in fact embraced it. This morning on ConHome, Paul Goodman questions whether Tory MPs even want to win the next election.
For some “lunatics”, to paraphrase Mr Soames commenting yesterday, this is not wide of the mark. The MP for...
9 tags
Putting purity before power: how many Tories truly...
Giles Marshall 11.58am
With Tory cabinet ministers scrambling over each other to assure the party of their Euro-scepticism, one might wonder what the fuss over UKIP is all about. Aside from a matter of timing, it seems most Tories are united on the referendum. Yet of course, there is more to it.
UKIP is not only a repository for Euro-sceptics. Indeed, Europe is just the hook on which to hang a...
13 tags
Getting below the skin of democratic reform
Henry Hopwood-Phillips 10.15am
The world is a-turning. The classes shift from lower, middle and upper to under, indebted and hereditary. Real power slips through MPs’ hands into those of constitutional lawyers, NGOs and financiers. Voters are confused and apathetic, confronted with a menu of social democrats donning different ribbons, that lack either the ideas, the conviction or the...
13 tags
Media trivialisation of North Korea masks the...
Jack Hands 10.25am
The North Korean state is responsible for systematically carrying out some of the darkest crimes against humanity this world has ever seen. Yet media and political reaction to the latest diplomatic tensions has predictably focused very little on the regime’s horrific human rights record.
The trivialisation of the North Korean problem is characterised by the media focusing...
April 2013
9 posts
11 tags
The West must respond to the use of chemical...
Alexander Pannett 1.15pm
There are growing reports that the Syrian regime of President Assad has been using chemical weapons against his own people. If true, it would herald the crossing of a “red line” for the US and may lead to military intervention from Western forces.
The use of chemical weapons currently appears to be small-scale, tactical deployments. A few chemical shells targeted at rebel...
14 tags
What does Jo Johnson's appointment to Downing...
Nik Darlington 9.55am
So the backroom shake-up in Downing Street is causing a mini stir this morning.
Leaving aside the prominent headline for a moment, our biggest congratulations go to the TRG’s vice-president, Jane Ellison, who has been appointed by the Prime Minister to a new policy board of MPs. Jane is joined by backbench colleagues Jesse Norman, George Eustice, Margot James and Jake...
17 tags
The One Nation Tory is alive and well: a response...
Nik Darlington 2.30pm
The passing of Baroness Thatcher has elicited a great deal of Tory stock-taking and soul-searching, as well as comment upon comment upon comment as to what the legacy is of Britain’s longest-serving Prime Minister of the twentieth century. As John Harris wrote in the Guardian, “Thatcher’s death has Britain peering back through time”.
In a subsequent...
7 tags
The Lady: Reflections on a political matriach
Giles Marshall 8.00am
I was nursing a hot chocolate in a small café beneath one of the North Yorkshire peaks when someone told me that Margaret Thatcher had died. There were no rumblings in the nearby mountains, no lighting strikes and the rain didn’t stop falling, but it was possible nonetheless to feel a sense of the profound.
All of us, after all, live in a country whose political...
2 tags
Mrs Thatcher's Marching Band Woke Me Up!
Jack Blackburn 10.40am
So, having been so rudely awoken by Her Majesty’s Armed Forces and Swing Band, I watched the rehearsal for Lady T’s funeral.
It was all deeply impressive. Loud music, orders being barked down Fleet Street and then followed in perfect unison, uniforms immaculately turned out, officers swishing swords, moments of mass stillness and silence, and, by the end of the...
17 tags
Margaret Thatcher's message for the TRG's...
Nik Darlington 9.00am
The morning’s newspapers are devoted to the death of Baroness Thatcher. The TRG made a statement yesterday and I made my own comments later.
While millions around the world mourn her passing, we remember her words at this organisation’s birth, in September 1975.
“I am pleased to learn of the formation of this new and vigorous group, and thank you for...
13 tags
What is Mrs Thatcher's legacy? Britain.
Nik Darlington 4.30pm
Margaret Thatcher did not get everything right. What politician does? But her legacy is not just a few policies here, a few new organisations there. Her legacy is the Britain we know. For how many politicians can we say that?
She changed the direction of the country’s travel. Not by a margin of degrees, but by right angles.
The Telegraph’s Peter Oborne wrote...
4 tags
Tory Reform Group: "The death of Baroness Thatcher...
The death earlier today of Baroness Thatcher marks the passing of an era in British politics. The most electorally successful of modern Conservative Prime Ministers and the only woman to hold the post, she helped change our country in a way that few leaders have ever done. Much of Britain’s domestic culture and international position is a result of her style of leadership and the vision of a...
12 tags
All right-thinking Eurosceptics need to get behind...
James Reekie 9.00am
The European Union’s unresolved constitutional status, and the sticking plaster approach of the Lisbon Treaty means that we need some new thinking in order to resolve our qualms over Europe. The Prime Minister can provide this. Like most people on the centre-right, I am sceptical of increasing European powers. I don’t believe the UK should be outside of the EU, but...
March 2013
9 posts
11 tags
Scots Tories setting out a positive vision for...
Andrew Morrison
On these pages in November 2012, I predicted that the Scottish party leader Ruth Davidson would eventually reverse her ‘line in the sand’ position on devolution of further powers to the Scottish Parliament, namely powers over the levying and collection of taxation.
The concept of our party supporting the transfer of additional powers was first espoused by Murdo Fraser. Alex...
10 tags
I can see no circumstances by which this blog can...
Nik Darlington
So the lacklustre rigmarole of a Royal Charter takes another turn. The House of Lords has been debating whether to exempt small blogs from the new cross-party press regulations.
The Government is considering its own response to the quandary posed by Internet blogs like Guido Fawkes that are based overseas.
It can be argued that a result of the Internet age is faster, better...
9 tags
With railways, the many smaller reforms matter as...
Matthew Plummer 10.49am
One of the reasons I was motivated to go out canvassing in the snow last weekend – not something I thought I’d be writing in late March – is the manner in which the Government has got stuck into overhauling the rail network. There’s been a lot of noise about the 50th anniversary of the Beeching Axe, which fell hardest under the Wilson Labour government. But...
8 tags
The growing threat of drug resistant bacteria
Alexander Pannett 12.15pm
Professor Dame Sally Davies, the Chief Medical Officer, has published an annual report that has made headlines by claiming that the rise in drug resistant infections is comparable to the threats of global warming and terrorism. She has called for the threat to be listed on the government’s National Register of Civil Emergencies.
The report highlights that, while a...
10 tags
A chance underwater encounter in New Caledonia
Nik Darlington 11.50am
We hovered in clear blue mid-water, soaring over a pristine piste of snow-white sand. Twenty metres to the shimmering sun on the surface, another five to the seabed below.
Out of the deeper-blue distance, I spotted shards of silver and grey. Then another. Those shards became shapes; the shapes became a grey-blue shadow.
Yannick and I locked eyes, nodded and returned...
12 tags
In praise of £9,000-per-year university tuition...
Matthew Plummer 10.58am
Children in their last year of school are gearing up for what one contemporary Scottish philosopher calls ‘squeaky bum time’. A-level exams in the summer suddenly don’t seem so far away, and shortly the contents of acceptance and rejection letters from institutions will start being broadcast in Facebook status updates up and down the country.
The...
22 tags
Human Rights Act: Some questions for Mr Grayling...
Craig Prescott 10.51am
Over the weekend, Chris Grayling, the Justice Secretary and Lord Chancellor, indicated that a Conservative majority government could repeal the Human Rights Act. Meanwhile, Theresa May, the Home Secretary, has suggested withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) itself.
These are two very different things, and there is some muddled thinking involved...
10 tags
A misguided cap on Bankers’ bonuses
Alexander Pannett 3.30pm
And so they are marching again. The restless European Parliament is finally getting its revenge against the unscrupulous “Anglo-Saxon” capitalists in London. It has voted to reign in bankers’ bonuses, reducing permitted amounts to the base salary of bankers.
The rules would apply to Europe-based employees of any bank, as well as to staff of European banks wherever they...
14 tags
Some lessons from Eastleigh for the Tory party
Giles Marshall 7.37am
That the Liberal Democrats won at all is a minor triumph and let no-one tell you otherwise.
This is a party mired in a truly demeaning scandal, whose media operation looked utterly out of shape and whose leader was subject to the sort of scrutiny usually reserved for pariahs and criminals.
Add to this the fact that Nick Clegg and the Lib Dems enjoy the support of not a...
February 2013
12 posts
14 tags
If you're in Eastleigh and you're reading this, do...
Craig Barrett 11.02am
Another Thursday, another by-election. Following the resignation in disgrace of Chris Huhne, voters are today going to the polls in a constituency that has been a tightly fought battleground between the Tories and the Lib Dems since the previous by-election, in 1994. A Lib Dem majority of fewer than 4,000 votes belies a seat where the Lib Dems have a very active party...
11 tags
Self-defeating ritual of ever-higher beer duty...
Nik Darlington 11.11am
Beer duty has bilged by more than 40 per cent in the past four years, which means when you buy that satisfying pint of ale in your local pub, around 190ml belongs to the taxman.
Meanwhile, more than 5,800 pubs have shut up shop since 2008 at a rate of eighteen per week. Quite frankly, it’s miserable, the sort of news to drive even the most abstemious to drink.
...
12 tags
Robert Buckland states the reformist case for...
Nik Darlington 4.20pm
TRG vice-president Robert Buckland had an article on ConservativeHome yesterday, in which he argued forcefully for Britain’s role at the head of the European table.
Robert rattled off a list of British achievements in Europe that really ought to be better known and understood: reform of the CFP, for instance, despite coming up against seemingly implacable...
16 tags
4G spectrum failure hardly surprising, but what is...
Nik Darlington 9.58am
When George Osborne said the Treasury would raise several billion pounds from the upcoming 4G auction, I along with many others feared (or even expected) that wouldn’t be the case. Some technical and financial reasons for why, but largely an informed hunch.
So it has come to pass. ‘Only’ £2.34 billion has been raised by Ofcom, despite the OBR’s...
9 tags
Mansion Tax: a self-indulgence to make a point,...
Nik Darlington 11.10am
In the 1920s and 1930s the sociologist Elton Mayo conducted a series of experiments to test the productivity of workers at the Hawthorne Works in Chicago. Later in the 1950s, Henry Landsberger interpreted the data to show how people change their behaviour when being studied closely. It is a crucially inherent human bias, called the ‘Hawthorne Effect’ after...
15 tags
The transatlantic trade pact is a death knell for...
Alexander Pannett 1.15 pm
On Wednesday, the EU and US announced plans to forge a free trade area within two years, that would see tariffs removed and markets liberalised between the two largest economies in the world.
It is estimated that, if the agreement is successful, the free trade area would improve competitiveness, create jobs and generate billions in trade for the two economic areas....
17 tags
Mid Staffs: Whither 38 Degrees?
Nik Darlington 3.16pm
In September 2011, I cavilled about the “rise of the clickocracy”, that multi-headed hydra of modern political ‘engagement’. The internet has spawned several campaigning movements, 38 Degrees being pre-eminent, who exist to put the democratic process within reach of a mere click. Click, click, clickety click - and the job is done. Your voice is...
15 tags
My Open Letter to Westminster
Henry Hopwood-Phillips 10.53am
There is a caustic and remarkably resilient strain of liberalism that is proving intransigent in spite of an unravelling of the trends that caused it. We live in a post-white, post-Christian society; however, an entrenched elite refuses to yield political ground to the sincere viewpoints of Islam and other minority faith groups on a range of vital issues from...
18 tags
Inflation targeting, or what Arsene Wenger and...
Matthew Robertson 1.36pm
May 2004: Arsène Wenger hailed as Arsenal go entire season undefeated to win the Premier League
December 2012: Arsène Wenger under increasing pressure as Arsenal lose to League Two side Bradford City in the Capital One Cup
October 1992: for the first time monetary policy in Britain would be based on an explicit target for inflation
December 2012: Mark Carney, the...
8 tags
What is Britain's place in the world?
Nik Darlington 12.45pm
The world is a dangerous place and it is only going to become more dangerous still, said William Hague over the weekend.
While sometimes it does not seem it, David Cameron’s tenure in Downing Street has been riven with foreign conflict. The mission in Afghanistan continues, though is winding down. Our resident foreign policy expert Aaron Ellis has blogged on...
11 tags
We should all be unsettled by the reaction towards...
Nik Darlington 10.44am
Looking down the voting list from last night prompts some sadness. They are not what Downing Street might describe as ‘the usual suspects’. Neither are they the types deserving of the subsequent vitriol.
What is done, is done. There is a majority for this in the country; there is a majority for this in Parliament. To make this a partisan issue is as...
10 tags
Gay marriage vote is very simple: forget the...
Nik Darlington 8.42am
There is a lot for Tories - or even just any sensible observer of politics - to be unhappy about over the Government’s same-sex marriage reforms.
No mention in either Coalition parties’ 2010 manifestos. No mention in the Coalition Agreement. Neither perceived nor existential agitation for it from homosexual people or otherwise. Manifesto commitments...
January 2013
12 posts
12 tags
Is our fear of dirty bombs leading us to disaster...
Alexander Pannett 11.50am
The crisis in Mali has reached new heights with the announcement that the UK will be sending 350 troops to the region.
The task of the soldiers is to train the Malian army and their deployment is seen as signaling a more long-term commitment to the region by the UK.
The use of soldiers is an escalation of the UK’s support for France, which had previously been solely...
11 tags
By attacking David Cameron the EU federalists are...
Miguel Nunes Silva 2.12pm
David Cameron’s much awaited speech on Europe was met with profound disappointment on the side of those who currently push for greater integration in the European Union.
By making a potential referendum on British membership conditional on a Conservative party re-election, Mr Cameron was criticised of pandering to populism.
Allowing structural state policy to be...
11 tags
The Conservative Party must connect with ordinary...
Francis Davis 2.00 pm
Recently, in the Conservative Party, there have been a slew of speeches, pamphlets and exhortations arguing to extend the ‘modernising’ project if the party is to stay in power. Yet among the least noticed developments in Conservative circles , but the most clocked among Labour’s team, was a break from the vitriol of ‘strivers’ versus ‘shirkers’ as Greg Clark set...
radicalwhig-deactivated20130129 asked: How can you say you're a reform group if all you do is support the PM on whatever decision he takes?
6 tags
Tory Reform Group supports an In/Out EU referendum
The Tory Reform Group supports the Prime Minister’s belief that it is in the national interest for Britain to play a leading role in the European Union. The EU is the largest trading bloc in the world and accounts for 50% of Britain’s trade. It is also apparent that business and our allies in the world, in particular the United States, have all advocated that Britain take the lead in...
14 tags
Cameron's EU referendum promise lays down the...
Nik Darlington 10.33am
“Mind your speech a little lest you should mar your fortunes.” David Cameron has followed the Bard’s advice to the letter. This has been the most mindful build-up to a prime ministerial speech in living memory. Are his fortunes intact?
First of all, I’m still keen on holding the EU referendum on the same day as the next General Election, something...
11 tags
At last, the Scottish Tories seem to be moving in...
Nik Darlington 3.02pm
At long last, the Scottish Conservatives are moving in the right direction on devolution.
Nearly one year ago, when commenting on the launch of the unionist Devo Plus group, I wrote that the Tories have to embrace greater devolution if they are to make any meaningful inroads in Scottish politics. Ruth Davidson assumed the leadership with a supposed “line in the...
11 tags
Who are UKIP?
Andrew Thorpe-Apps 3.57pm
The United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) has been suffering from internal tensions for some time. The party is fundamentally divided between those with a socially conservative outlook, and those with a more libertarian perspective.
On top of this, and as can been seen with all political parties, there is an increasing generational split. As an example, roughly 60...
12 tags
Set Europe aside, Mr Cameron, and reinvigorate a...
Giles Marshall 10.49am
I’m not sure “Fresh Start” is quite the right name for a group of Tory MPs busy re-hashing what is by now a pretty hackneyed message. The group is publishing a report calling for the repatriation of significant powers from the EU to Britain.
So the same call that has been made by Tory MPs since Margaret Thatcher’s Bruges speech – a fresh start indeed.
Yet, of...
10 tags
Nick Boles must combine planning with social...
Nik Darlington 10.26am
Nick Boles, the planning minister, would appear to have spent most of his time in office irritating conservationists, the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph about his plans to concrete over England’s green and pleasant land with suburban semis.
The truth, as always, is more nuanced than that. As Mr Boles demonstrated when delivering last year’s Macmillan...
10 tags
Google's Goggles, Apocalypse and Descartes
Henry Hopwood-Phillips 1.39pm
Recently I was asked by a colleague to explain what I meant by a phrase I had been slurring into my pint glass. Imagine all the pomposity that must lace a statement such as ”the latest symbol of the new order is the antisemitic zionist”, then double it and blame it on the fact I hadn’t drunk in a while. In the end I found myself having to slip into...
5 tags
The Failure of Universities
Giles Marshall 11.30am
So finally a university lecturer has had a go at students for not attending lectures. The highly regarded medieval historian Guy Halsall, who adorns the York history department, apparently let loose something of a rant that involved his expression of displeasure that too few students bothered turning up for his lectures. He posted his views online, on the university’s...
December 2012
10 posts
4 tags
Merry Christmas one and all, see you in 2013!
Nik Darlington 4.44pm
Well, we’ve made it through the day, nearly (BOOM! Mayan Apocalypse joke!).
And it’s time for Egremont to put his hat on the stand, loosen that top (and bottom) button, pour himself a glass of Sherry, and enjoy a Christmas break.
We’ll see you all again on 7th January. Have a very merry Christmas, one and all.
7 tags
Immigration, integration and Labour's credibility...
Andrew Thorpe-Apps 1.48pm
In a recent speech in Tooting, Ed Miliband outlined plans to ensure that frontline staff in the state sector are able to speak ‘proficient’ English. It is part of achieving what he labelled a ‘connected nation’ rather than a ‘segregated one’.
“If we are going to build one nation, we need to start with everyone in Britain knowing how to speak English. We...
10 tags
Lessons to be learned about the police, the press...
Giles Marshall 10.55am
At the time of Andrew Mitchell’s regrettable outburst of temper, I commented on the distinctly dubious behaviour of the police themselves. My concerns were that - once again - police records had allegedly been leaked to newspapers with impunity, and that the Police Federation was engaged in an unedifying witch-hunt against Mr Mitchell. It turns out that the affair may...
