As Matthew Elliott pointed out yesterday, there’s a long way to go. But there’s a story of progress in key appointments that should be told.
More than three years after the election, why is an Ed Balls stooge on the public payroll backing a smacking ban?
The DCLG only funds those who lobby against their policies
By Paul GoodmanFollow Paul on Twitter. For all Francis Maude's ultra-modernising views, his Conservative roots run very deep: after all, his father, Angus Maude, was Margaret Thatcher's Paymaster-General and co-author, with Enoch Powell, of Biography of a Nation. In his time, man who now holds the same post as his father has been a Treasury […]
By Mark Wallace Follow Mark on Twitter. "Pity the rational politician", laments the header on Peter Kellner's Telegraph article today. Leaving aside the question of how many rational politicians there are, why should we pity them? Do so, Kellner tells us, because they're lumbered with such a stubborn electorate. Voters just won't believe the facts. The numbers and […]
By Mark WallaceFollow Mark on Twitter. The need for politicians to reconnect with the electorate is beyond debate. Falling turnout, the collapse in party memberships, and widespread disillusionment with politics and its practitioners all demonstrate the scale of the problem. The initial reaction of the political class to this problem was to come up with the worst […]
By Paul GoodmanFollow Paul on Twitter. Before Margaret Thatcher, the following was true as a rough rule of thumb. The arts leaned left, as now. The armed forces, the judges, the police and even, arguably, the teaching profession leaned right. The civil service was somewhere in the middle. In short, the left's "long march through […]
By Paul GoodmanFollow Paul on Twitter Harry Phibbs wrote about Eric Pickles's record this morning. CLG spending is counted under two headings – CLG Local Government and CLG Communities. The former, the larger of the two budgets, has risen by about a £1 billion, and is slightly south of £27 billion. Figures for the latter […]
By Paul GoodmanFollow Paul on Twitter And now for something bigger still: Education. 2010 – 2011 Outturn: £59,922,700 b 2011 – 2012 Outturn: £56,391,000 b Michael Gove's department is a particularly interesting one to examine, given the plan to cut his department's administrative costs by half, which Peter Hoskin reported recently on this site. I […]
By Paul GoodmanFollow Paul on Twitter And now for something a little bit bigger: The Justice Department. 2010 – 2011 Outturn: £9,338,400 b 2011 – 2012 Outturn: £9,026,000 b Tim Montgomerie has set out in detail on this site how Ken Clarke made these savings as Justice Secretary. Mr Clarke may not be ConservativeHome's biggest […]
By Paul GoodmanFollow Paul on Twitter Cabinet Office 2010 – 2011 Outturn: £2,544,200 b 2011 – 2012 Outturn: £2,473,000 b "Unprecedented reductions in spending on public services" – Paul Johnson, Institute of Fiscal Studies.
By Paul GoodmanFollow Paul on Twitter I concluded our The Wrong Right series this morning with Why does so much of the Right treat cutting spending as light entertainment? To follow it up, a series of posts will go up today showing how, despite suggestions from some on the right to the contrary, departmental budgets […]
By Paul GoodmanFollow Paul on Twitter In some ways, John Bercow has turned out to be a good Speaker, speeding up business, discomforting Ministers by allowing more Urgent Questions, and generally standing up for the legislature against the executive, which is a big part of what he's there's for. In one particular way, however, he […]
I’ve set out our ambition to have the best digital government offering in the G7 by the time of the next election. We are well on the way to meeting that.