Afternoon summary
- Stella Creasy, the Labour MP and runner up in last year’s deputy leadership contest, has accused Momentum, the group made up of Jeremy Corbyn supporters, of favouring “righteous bystanding” over proper activism. In a speech at the LSE she said she was worried support for Corbyn was not translating into proper political engagement. She said:
Even when people aren’t shouting at each other, they aren’t being encouraged to take action either.
Groups like Momentum now appear to be draining the very energy from our political process they claimed to be promoting, by encouraging the myth righteous bystanding is activism.
Righteous bystanding can take many forms - petitions, protests, boycotts, hashtags, meetings. It has at its heart talking about doing something over actually doing something.
In the last six months I’ve seen little evidence of campaigning ‘for’ something. I have seen a lot of meetings and moralising – and a lot of people standing for positions to be able to divert people into more meetings and moralising to complete the cycle.
- The Home Office has announced that businesses are to be forced to pay an annual £1,000 charge for every skilled worker they employ from outside Europe. The move follows a recommendation by the Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) earlier this year.
- A poll for Ipsos MORI suggests the budget has had a very bad impact on the government’s standing. George Osborne’s ratings as chancellor are as low as they have ever been and David Cameron’s ratings are at their lowest for three year. Labour is only two points behind the Conservatives and Jeremy Corbyn’s satisfaction ratings are higher than Cameron’s. Gideon Skinner, head of political research at Ipsos MORI, said:
It’s been one of the worst weeks for the Conservatives since the election in terms of public opinion. Public reaction to the budget is in 2012 ‘omnishambles’ territory, and on some measures even worse, while also dragging David Cameron’s personal ratings to their lowest for three years. The drop in confidence in the government’s long-term economic plan – crucial to their election victory – is another cause for concern, but only if Labour can take advantage.
That’s all from me for today.
I’m off next week, but, if we’re not running a full politics blog, I’ll ensure we run a readers’ editon from Tuesday.
Happy Easter everyone.
Updated
Stephen Crabb has made his first visit to a job centre since becoming work and pensions secretary, the Press Association reports.
Crabb, who replaced Iain Duncan Smith after his sudden resignation last week, met claimants and staff in Enfield, north London, where the Jobcentre Plus office deals with more than 20,000 customers at any one time.
He said: “It’s incredibly important to me to meet the jobcentre staff delivering our first-rate services, as well as those who are seeking to improve their employment prospects.
“Since 2010 this Government has transformed the welfare system from one that locked far too many people in to poverty to one where people are supported in to work and gaining financial independence.
“I want to build on this excellent work and ensure we have a system that helps people to get the support they need, so they can get back in to work and improve their lives and those of their families.”
Crabb was joined by employment minister Priti Patel, who added: “The number of long-term unemployed claimants in Enfield is at its lowest level since 2009, a credit to jobcentre staff and thriving local businesses.”
The PM has left this morning for the Canary Islands for a “short break with his family” and will be away until Wednesday, Downing Street has confirmed. We reported last week that he was going to Lanzarote, despite having urged people to take holidays in the flood-hit north of England this Easter. On Wednesday night he told MPs at the 1922 committee that he felt like he needed “time to think”.
Updated
This isn’t the first time Jeremy Corbyn has been ahead of David Cameron in Ipsos MORI’s satisfaction ratings. The archive of figures are here, and they show that Corbyn was ahead of Cameron on net satisfaction from September last year until December.
Corbyn ahead of Cameron on satisfaction rating, poll finds
Here is more from the Ipsos MORI poll.
It shows Jeremy Corbyn ahead of David Cameron on net satisfaction (the proportion satisfied with the way each is doing his job, minus those dissatisfied).
And, on voting intention, it shows Labour two points behind the Conservatives. (This is the Ipsos MORI headline measure, which takes into account likelihood to vote.)
George Osborne's evidence to the Treasury committee - Summary
Here are the main points from George Osborne’s evidence to the Treasury committee about the budget. It was a less combative hearing then normal, mainly because the Labour MP John Mann, the committee’s resident interrogative rottweiler, was not there, but nevertheless the questioning was substantive, and reasonably productive.
- Osborne insisted he had no plans for further welfare cuts - but refused to explicitly rule them out. He repeated the line first announced by Stephen Crabb, the new work and pensions secretary, about the government not planning any further cuts to welfare, but he would not give a firm commitment not to cut welfare. Despite being repeatedly pressed, he refused to give any indication as to how the government would compensate for the £1.3bn-a-year hole in his financial plans left by the decision not to go ahead with the Personal Independence Payment cuts. Quoting Robert Chote, head of the Office for Budget Responsibility, he said this was “not that large a sum” and that by the time of the autumn statement other forecasts may have changed. Labour’s Helen Goodman said that taking into account planned departmental cuts, public sector pension cuts, the need to compensate councils for cuts to business rates and the PIP U-turn, there was more than £7bn than Osborne needed to find that he had not fully accounted for. Another Labour MP, Rachel Reeves, said Osborne’s evasion suggested further welfare cuts were possible in the autumn statement. She told him:
I think anybody listening to this will have to conclude that it is entirely possible that you will make further cuts to welfare in the autumn statement.
Osborne rejected this, telling her.
That is not the conclusion I would draw from listening to me.
But Andrew Tyrie, the Conservative MP who chairs the committe, said it had become a “standing joke that when any government department says they have no present plans to do something it must be about to do it”.
- Osborne said he did not accept an analysis from the Institute for Fiscal Studies showing that the tax and benefit changes he has introduced since the election are regressive. Asked about this by Goodman, he said the IFS analysis worked on the assumption that extra spending paid for by borrowing was a gain for families. He rejected that, he said. (See 11.54am.) He also said the analysis did not include things like the “national living wage”. And he said another IFS analysis said income inequality was at a 25-year low.
- Tyrie said that Osborne’s decision to alter his plans twice a year was giving the government “a great deal of political grief”. He suggested it might be more “prudent” for Osborne to stick to longer-term targets, rather than dramatically altering his plans twice a year. “You are locking yourself into quite arbitrary short-term changes,” said Tyrie. He said changing the twice-a-year cycle of budgets and autumn statements could “spare the government a great deal of political grief” of the kind seen over the last week. But Osborne said he would have been “rightly criticised” if he had not altered his plans in the light of new forecasts from the OBR.
- Osborne said the relationship between the Treasury and the Department for Work and Pensions was always “difficult”. Referring to Iain Duncan Smith, who resigned as work and pensions secretary last week, Osborne said:
I am sorry that Iain left the government, I worked with him over six years. It was always going to be a difficult relationship between the chancellor and the person in charge of the largest spending department. That is what the jobs require of us.
- Osborne signalled that the Treasury’s report on the costs and benefits of EU membership would be published by the middle of April. He is due to give evidence to the committee again on 19 April and he said he planned to publish it at least four days before then.
- He said leaving the EU would be cause a “convulsive shock” to the economy.
I think our exit from the EU would cause an economic shock, or a convulsive shock, as it’s been described recently, and that would have an impact on prices and GDP and the like.
That’s not just my judgment, that’s a judgment expressed by a whole range of independent observers of the British economy who have no skin in the game.
- He said that it was “highly likely” that he would give the Bank of England greater powers to intervene in the buy-to-let mortgage market within months. As the Press Association reports, a consultation was launched by ministers last year after the Bank of England’s financial policy committee, whose role is to identify and head off possible risks to the financial system, recommended it should be granted the power to direct regulators to require lenders to place restrictions on buy-to-let loans. Osborne told MPs:
The Bank of England and the financial policy committee have identified potential systemic risks in the large increase in the buy-to-let market ... It is highly likely we will give the FPC powers over the buy-to-let market. It is possible we can do that later this year.
The FPC has recommended it should be allowed, if necessary, to direct regulators to require limits on buy-to-let lending. These limits could apply to lending in terms of loan-to-value ratios or interest coverage ratios (ICRs). A buy-to-let mortgage’s ICR is the ratio of the expected rental income from the buy-to-let property to the expected mortgage interest payments. The FPC has already been given powers of direction over the residential mortgage market.
- Osborne said the government would fight any legal challenge to sugar tax “robustly”. He said firms would do best not wasting money on fighting it in the courts. But if they wanted to fight, “bring it on”, he said.
Updated
Tyrie is just winding up the session now. He thanks Osborne for coming, says he looks forward to seeing him in April and says that, although Osborne faced some tough questions, he did come into office having to deal with a record deficit.
This is from Reuters’ William James.
Tyrie ends his committee's marathon grilling of George Osborne with the verbal equivalent of a friendly hug.
— William James (@WJames_Reuters) March 24, 2016
I will post a summary soon.
Updated
The Ipsos MORI poll also shows that people think the budget is bad for them personally and, by a much bigger margin, bad for the country.
And here is another extract from the Ipsos MORI news release.
The chancellor’s poor performance in satisfaction ratings this month is mirrored by the public reaction to the budget proposals. When asked about the budget proposals specifically the poll finds:
- One in three (35%) believe they are a good thing for them personally while two in five (40%) think they are a bad thing.
- Three in ten (30%) think they are a good thing for the country while more than half (53%) think they are a bad thing.
- Three in ten (29%) think they are a good thing for the next generation while more than half (53%) think they are a bad thing.
Cutting disability benefits was especially unpopular with the public with 84% opposed to the proposal and just 13% in support of it. Even supporters of Mr Osborne’s own party show strong opposition with seven in ten (71%) Conservatives opposed to the plan and 22% in support of it. Despite a win with the sugar tax (69% supporting it and 26% opposed) half (49%) disagree that in the long term the government’s policies will improve the economy (43% believe they will).
Updated
Osborne's satisfaction rating as chancellor never been lower, says Ipsos MORI
Here is the Ipsos MORI chart showing George Osborne’s latest satisfaction rating.
And here is an excerpt from the Ipsos MORI news release about this poll.
One week following George Osborne’s budget announcement, Ipsos MORI’s new Political Monitor shows the chancellor’s satisfaction ratings have fallen compared to last month. Three in five (60%) say they are dissatisfied with the performance of Mr Osborne (up 14 points from February) compared to one in four (27%) who say they are satisfied (down 13 points). This equals his worst performance in March 2013. Mr Osborne still has the backing of most of his party with three in five (58%) Conservative supporters saying they are satisfied with the Chancellor (although 31% are dissatisfied).
Osborne says leaving EU would cause ‘convulsive shock’ to the economy
Osborne says leaving the EU would cause a “convulsive shock” which would have an impact on prices and GDP.
- Osborne says leaving the EU would cause a ‘convulsive shock’ to the economy.
Osborne says Treasury's EU report to be published in April
Q: The press has been briefed that this will be published in May.
Osborne says it will be before the purdah period. He will tell the committee when he has a date.
Osborne says he is likely to be able to ask him about it when he next appears before the committee.
Q: That hearing will be on Europe. We will want to have some time to have read that document. Will we get at least four working days to read it?
Osborne says he cannot remember the date he has agreed to appear.
Q: It will be 19 April.
Osborne says the committee will have had time to digest it.
Q: It will be in the first week back after the Easter recess.
Osborne says he has not decided yet.
- Osborne suggests the Treasury’s report on the benefits and costs of EU membership will be published by the middle of April.
Osborne says he can give an assurance that there will be at least four working days between the document’s publication and his appearance at the committee.
Tyrie says the committee will be very reluctant to change the date of that hearing.
Q: You will be publishing a Treasury analysis of the costs and benefits of EU membership. Will the OBR assess that?
No, says Osborne.
Q: Do you accept that you drew the OBR into the EU referendum debate?
No, says Osborne.
But he says it would have been odd to have given a budget speech without mentioning the EU referendum. In his speech he specifically said the OBR was neutral, he says.
The Conservative Steve Baker goes next.
Q: How confident are you that your productivity plans will work?
Osborne says he is optimistic he can improve productivity growth.
He says his ambition is “stretching”.
Q: Productivity growth is expected to be permanently lower. So can productivity growth drive economic growth.
Osborne says he is optimistic about productivity growth, but that he is not basing his plans on it.
He says there has been research into productivity and some of the findings are strange. For example, booking a holiday with a travel agent in person is deemed more productive than doing it online. That does not feel right, he says.
There is a view that productivity growth has come to an end, he says. But he does not accept that. He believes things like the ability to book taxis online must improve productivity.
UPDATE: These are the figures Baker was referring to in that second question.
Scary chart from @resfoundation: @OBR_UK now assumes the financial crisis blew a permanent hole in productivity: pic.twitter.com/ZUQm9ITCuC
— Heather Stewart (@GuardianHeather) March 17, 2016
Updated
Osborne suggests savings from proposed benefit cut for EU migrants could help fill £1.3bn hole in budget
Q: Is it possible you might make further cuts to welfare at the autumn statement?
Osborne says he has no plans to do that.
He is not going to replace the £1.3bn with another welfare cut.
Q: So there could be further cuts?
Osborne says if the UK votes to stay in the EU, by the autumn the government will be going ahead with the welfare cut for EU migrants.
Q: So that’s a new cut.
No, says Osborne. It has already been announced.
Q: Anyone listening to this would conclude that there will be further welfare cuts.
Osborne says that is not the conclusion he would draw.
- Osborne suggests savings from the proposed benefit cut for EU migrants could help to fill the £1.3bn hole in his budget.
(It is worth pointing out, though, that the proposed benefits cut for EU migrants is not expected to raise a sum this large.)
Updated
Q: There are four ways you could plug the £4.4bn gap in the budget caused by the PIP cut: higher taxes, departmental spending cuts, welfare cuts, or higher borrowing. Which will you choose?
Osborne says he will announce this in his autumn statement.
(The cost of the PIP U-turn is sometimes quoted as £4.4bn, over four years, or £1.3bn, the annual cost by the end of the decade.)
Updated
Osborne defends the idea of having a welfare cap.
Previously the Treasury would spend a great deal of time worrying about something like the Welsh Office budget, but doing nothing about the welfare budget, even though it is much, much larger.
Updated
Rachel Reeves goes next.
Q: Will you meet the welfare cap in any year in this parliament?
Osborne says that will be assessed at the time of the autumn statement. But the government is not currently meeting it.
Q: Is it still government policy?
Yes, says Osborne.
Q: Will you plan to meet it?
Osborne says the government will either have to comply with it, or explain why it won’t.
Andrew Tyrie goes next.
Q: Wouldn’t it be better if you had carried on publishing your own distributional analysis in the form you did in the 2010-15 parliament?
Osborne says that analysis assumed that all fiscal consolidation was a bad thing.
He says the new Treasury distributional analysis (pdf) looks at how public spending is allocated. It shows it is being fairly allocated, and that the rich are paying more in income tax.
Q: Will you publish the old figures too?
Osborne says he thinks his approach is better.
- Osborne defends decision to ditch the Treasury’s old distributional analysis of the budget’s impact.
Osborne rejects claims that his plans are regressive
Goodman turns to the IFS’s distributional impact of the budget.
Osborne says the IFS assumes that extra spending funded by borrowing is a win for families. If he borrowed £100bn and spent it on families, the IFS would score that as a win. But it would not be a win for them, he says.
And he says the IFS figures do not take into account things like the impact of the national living wage.
Goodman quotes from these figures in the IFS assessement.
Osborne quotes from another IFS analysis saying income inequality is at a 25-year low.
He says the IFS figures take into account the increase in the personal allowance and the higher rate threshold. He says Goodman’s party, Labour, voted for these changes. But Goodman does not seem happy about this.
- Osborne rejects claims that his plans are regressive.
Updated
Q: You have to find the money to make up for the £1.3bn PIP U-turn. And there is another unexplained £300m from the business rates transfer. Will this come from further cuts, higher tax or extra borrowing?
Osborne says he does not accept her assessment on business rates.
On PIP, he says there are many other factors affecting the forecast for welfare spending. It is “not that large a sum” in the light of other uncertainties, as Robert Chote has said.
The government will make an assessment in the autumn statement.
Q: So you hope you will find it down the back of the sofa? Or it will be lost in rounding up?
Osborne says he will see what the economy looks like at the time.
Q: If you add all these things up, they come to more than £7bn. That will put at risk your hope of getting the budget into surplus.
Osborne says he does not accept the £7bn figure.
He says the last week has seen figures showing house price figures and share prices are rising. Both those things increase tax receipts.
- Osborne says he will not explain how he will compensate for the PIP cut U-turn until the autumn statement.
Q: There are several areas were you have not said how cuts will be achieved. You have not said how departments will cut spending by £3.5bn. And another £2bn is coming from pensions.
Osborne says departments have been able to cut spending on this scale before.
The Hutton report on public sector pensions said the public sector pension arrangements (the “discount rate”) should be reviewed.
Q: How will these cuts be distributed between departments?
Osborne says allocating where the pension cuts will fall is a complicated process.
But costs need to be controlled, he says.
Goodman says the reducation in business rates leads to an increase in the corporation tax take.
That means small businesses will get a £5.5bn cut, not a £7bn cut as Osborne said in his speech, she says.
Osborne says Goodman is talking about OBR assumptions.
Businesses have welcomed this, he says.
He says for an individual business he has either reduced or eliminated business rates.
Helen Goodman, the Labour MP, goes next.
Osborne says the money allocated to local authorities in future years will reflect the amount lost from the cut in business rates.
Goodman says this could mean the Treasury having to spend £350m in 2020.
Osborne's poll ratings plunge following budget, Ipsos MORI says
The Evening Standard has some bad new for Osborne today.
George Osborne’s ratings have plunged, according to exclusive polling taken before and after his disastrous eighth budget.
The full scale of the damage is revealed in Ipsos MORI research showing public hostility has grown towards the chancellor, his policies and even David Cameron ...
Six in 10 people are dissatisfied with Mr Osborne, including a third of Conservative supporters, compared with 46 per cent of the public in the month before the budget.
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who led opposition to cuts in disability benefits, has enjoyed a surge in his ratings, overtaking David Cameron.
Mr Osborne’s budget was the most unpopular since 2010 for the country, with majorities saying it was bad for the country and bad for the next generation.
Rachel Reeves, the Labour former shadow work and pensions secretary, goes next.
Q: Duncan Smith said he did not want the PIP consultation to be part of the budget. He wanted to announce his plans after the budget. Was there a discussion about this?
Osborne says he will not get into private discussions.
But there was collective agreement to publish the DWP plans on the Friday before the budget. If there had not been, it would not have been published then.
- Osborne refuses to deny that Duncan Smith wanted to announce the PIP cuts after the budget, not as part of the budget.
Q: Duncan Smith says he did not know about the PIP U-turn until he heard about it from the media.
Osborne says he thought he had made it clear after the budget that the government wanted time to get this right.
Osborne says the relationship between Treasury and DWP is always “difficult”
Osborne says the relationship between the chancellor and the minister in charge of the biggest spending department will always be a difficult one.
But he is sorry that Duncan Smith has resigned.
- Osborne says the relationship between the Treasury and the DWP is always “difficult”.
Osborne: "I'm sorry Iain left Government, always difficult relationship between Chancellor & person running biggest spending department"
— Faisal Islam (@faisalislam) March 24, 2016
Andrew Tyrie goes next. He raises Duncan Smith’s interview with Andrew Marr.
Last thing George Osborne wanted to hear from Andrew Tyrie: "can we return to Iain Duncan Smith's interview with Andrew Marr?"
— Heather Stewart (@GuardianHeather) March 24, 2016
Q: Duncan Smith says he opposed putting the PIP cuts in the budget. Is that right?
Osborne says there was a collective decision making process.
Q: It sounds like you do not remember it like that.
Osborne says he has put it in his own words.
Q: Stephen Crabb, the work and pensions secretary, said the government would not cut welfare spending. But the Treasury is just saying it has no plans for this. Which is it?
Osborne says the government will not seek further cuts. It has no further plans for welfare cuts. It will focus on implementing the cuts already announced.
Q: Duncan Smith said it would have been better to cut benefits for wealthy pensioners. Will you consider that?
Osborne says he is ruling out for this parliament touching the pensioner benefits the Conservative manifesto pledged to protect. They are: winter fuel payments, free bus passes and free TV licences.
On TV licences, the BBC will take responsibility for this after 2020.
On TV licences, he says the amount you would save by taking these from wealthy pensioners would be £100m to £200m. That is a small sum in the overall welfare budget.
He says he has cut tax relief for the amount going into pensions.
He has also increased the pension age. That will have half a trillion pounds, he says.
But he wants to ensure pensioners keep getting a “decent, generous state pension”.
He says a dramatic reduction of pensioners poverty has been one of the great achievements of this government.
Q: At one point did Iain Duncan Smith first raise concerns with you about your plans for Personal Independence Payments.
Osborne says he does not want to get into that.
It was clear in the autumn that forecast for spending on PIP was higher than expected. The DWP proposed changes. Those plans were withdrawn, he says.
Q: The OBR says not going ahead with the PIP cuts will cost £1.3bn, but that this will not materially affect your chances of hitting the surplus target. If so, why did you propose them in the first place?
Osborne says the DWP was responding to the conclusions of a review by Paul Gray.
Q: If the OBR says this will not affect the surplus target, doesn’t that show that the cuts were political, as Duncan Smith said.
Osborne says cuts to welfare were necessary. Those proposals were in the context of a rising PIP budget and an independent review.
Wes Streeting, the Labour MP, goes next.
He starts by saying when President Obama visits the UK, he won’t call Osborne Jeffrey (a reference to this story) but Bungle.
Osborne hints disability cuts not off the table: 'Clearly if you are going to make reforms... you need to go about it in a better way'
— Jason Groves (@JasonGroves1) March 24, 2016
Osborne says he is “highly likely” to give Bank of England more powers to contain the buy-to-let housing market
Q: The Bank of England has said the growth of the buy-to-let market is a risk to the economy. Do you have any views on whether to give the Bank of England powers over this?
Osborne says it is “highly likely” that he will give the Bank of England’s financial policy committee further powers to control the buy-to-let market.
He says there is a risk of a property bubble.
- Osborne says he is “highly likely” to give Bank of England more powers to contain the buy-to-let housing market.
Osborne says the government will fight any legal challenge to sugar tax 'robustly'
Q: On the sugar tax, there has been talk of a legal challenge. What is the government’s position?
Osborne says many companies are trying to do that right thing, and reduce the sugar in their drinks, and that is to be applauded.
Other companies are just opposed, he says. If they want to try to fight it, “I saw, ‘Bring it on’.”
He says the sugar tax will come in in 2018 so that companies have time to change their products.
He says he took legal advice before announcing the policy, and is sure it is legal. If there is a legal challenge, the government will fight it “robustly”.
He advises firms not to waste time on a legal challenge.
- Osborne says the government will fight any legal challenge to sugar tax “robustly”. He says firms would do best not wasting money on fighting it in the courts. But if they want to fight, “bring it on”, he says.
Chris Philp, a Conservative, goes next.
Q: Why is it important to run a surplus?
Osborne says what Labour are proposing would lead to a “permanent deficit”. He believes in normal times the government should be running a surplus.
Q: Robert Chote, head of the OBR, thinks you are locking yourself in to quite arbitrary short-term changes. You changed your fiscal charter three times last year.
Osborne says he is willing to take difficult decisions to improve the public finances. The IMF recently praised the simplicity of his surplus rule, he says.
Q: But does it make sense to make adjustments to fiscal policy twice a year to accommodate a target for the end of the parliament?
Osborne says the OBR changed its forecast. He could have ignored that. But previous chancellors have ignored changing forecasts. It is better to “get ahead of the curve”.
This is from Sky’s Faisal Islam.
Osborne seeking to make a virtue of responding quickly to the big adjustments from the OBR's downgrade of productivity
— Faisal Islam (@faisalislam) March 24, 2016
Andrew Tyrie, the Conservative chair of the committee, starts.
He says it was a “rather curious budget”.
Q: Is it sensible to make these spending adjustments twice every year?
Osborne says the overall budget judgment is about repairing the public finances.
He would have been criticised in the autumn statement if he had planned for a £40bn surplus by not “spending” the extra money released by the improvement in the forecasts.
George Osborne's evidence to the Treasury committee
George Osborne is about to give evidence to the Treasury committee about the budget.
You can watch the hearing here.
Here is a Guardian video from Donald Trump’s interview.
Alan Duncan criticises Leave for promoting 'Marxism of the Right' as he declares for Remain
Sir Alan Duncan, the Conservative former international development secretary, is generally seen as one of the party’s more hardline Eurosceptics. Yet, in an article in the Daily Telegraph, he has announced that he had decided to vote for Britain to remain in the EU. He says he had expected to end up campaigning for Brexit but that on reflection he has decided leaving the EU would be “fraught with danger”.
The lure of Brexit is that it would deliver for the UK a tidy alternative to EU membership, and that restored self-government would empower our economic prospects and help insulate the UK from global difficulties. Our democracy would be purified, our border controls would solve the problem of immigration, and we would prosper as an economy untrammelled by others’ rules. The trouble is: I don’t think this is true ...
It is a fundamental tenet of Conservative thought that we are realists who take the world as we find it – and that we reject utopian philosophies which offer a path towards perfection. Some say that leaving the EU is no different to resigning from the local cricket club and that we can simply return the UK to the status quo ante. The language of this theoretical paradise has become the Marxism of the Right. It is unwise, and is fraught with danger.
He says the most compelling reasons for staying in the EU are political.
For me, however, the most compelling arguments are political. Our withdrawal from the EU would do nothing to help arrest the rise of the far Right in Germany, prevent worrying developments in Turkey, or address economic pressures in Greece, Italy and Spain. We are all facing massive danger from the shores of the Mediterranean, with utter anarchy in Syria, fragile authority in Egypt, and a vacuum of power in Libya. Only politics can adequately address the deep challenges of the region ...
Whereas I used to think that our membership of the EU signified a loss of confidence in ourselves, I now think that leaving it would be an unforgivable expression of no confidence in our ability to affect the course of Europe’s future. We cannot shape that vision by looking in history’s rear-view mirror and opting to retrench.
Updated
Europol chief says Dearlove underestimates the EU's terrorism-fighting capacity
Rob Wainwright, director of Europol, the EU’s law enforcement agency, told the Today programme this morning that he did not agree with Sir Richard Dearlove’s analyis. (See 9.38am.) He suggested that Dearlove did not appreciate how much things had changed since Dearlove left his post as head of MI6 in 2004. Wainwright said:
I certainly respect Sir Richard’s views but in the 10 years or so since he left office I have seen huge progress in the EU in building up a far stronger capability to fight terrorism and serious crime. The UK has very often been the driver of that work.
He said last year 2,500 new cases of cross-border crime and terrorism were launched through Europol by the British authorities. “I see the benefit of that for British police authorities every day,” he added.
On Channel 4 News last night Michael Fallon, the defence secretary, said he did not accept Sir Richard Dearlove’s analysis. (See 9.38am.) He said:
The fact is, across Europe we do have these mechanisms now for sharing flight information, sharing intelligence about terrorists; movements, swapping data about them that enable all intelligence services across Europe to pool their efforts to try to keep a tab on them.
What is very clear to me as the defence secretary charged with helping to keep this country safe is that we should not be leaving international organisations or intelligence-sharing partnerships, that would be exactly the wrong thing to do.
On the contrary, when you are faced with a terrorist threat we should be sharing as much information as possible and we should be coming to the aid of our allies and friends rather than walking out on them.
Former MI6 chief says leaving EU could make Britain safer
In the past it was never thought that national security was an important factor in the debate about EU membership but in recent months David Cameron and others campaigning for Britain to remain in have been making much of the argument that the country would be less safe if it left. At the launch of the Britain Stronger in Europe campaign last year security was the top story.
But an article by Sir Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6, has knocked several holes in the Remain camp’s security case. Writing in Prospect, he says that the security cost of Brexit would be “low” and that in some respects being outside the EU could make Britain safer.
Here are the key points.
- Dearlove says the security risk to Britain from leaving the EU would be “low”.
Whether one is an enthusiastic European or not, the truth about Brexit from a national security perspective is that the cost to Britain would be low.
- He said Brexit would bring two potential advantages.
Brexit would bring two potentially important security gains: the ability to dump the European convention on human rights—remember the difficulty of extraditing the extremist Abu Hamza of the Finsbury Park Mosque—and, more importantly, greater control over immigration from the European Union.
(Given that the European convention on human rights is not an EU agreement, it is not entirely clear what he means, although because EU states are obliged to abide by the convention, leaving the EU could make it easier for Britain to walk away from the convention too.)
- He says not being part of the European arrest warrant system would not make much difference to Britain. “Its importance has been exclusively criminal and few would notice its passing,” he says. This is significant because Theresa May, the home secretary, has cited the European arrest warrant was one of the reasons she supports staying in the EU.
- He said not being in the EU would not stop EU intelligence agencies cooperating with their British counterparts.
If a security source in Germany learns that a terrorist attack is being planned in London, the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, Germany’s domestic intelligence service, is certainly not going to withhold the intelligence from MI5 simply because the UK is not an EU member.
- He said European intelligence-sharing bodies were mostly ineffective, not least because they were considered “leaky”.
In addition, though the UK participates in various European and Brussels-based security bodies, they are of little consequence: the Club de Berne, made up of European Security Services; the Club de Madrid, made up of European Intelligence Services; Europol; and the Situation Centre in the European Commission are generally speaking little more than forums for the exchange of analysis and views.
With the exception of Europol, these bodies have no operational capacity and with 28 members of vastly varying levels of professionalism in intelligence and security, the convoy must accommodate the slowest and leakiest of the ships of state.
The larger powers cannot put their best intelligence material into such colanders.
- He said EU defence cooperation was “little more than an aspiration”.
- He said leaving the EU would not damage Britain’s defence and intelligence relationship with the US.
Would Brexit damage our defence and intelligence relationship with the United States, which outweighs anything European by many factors of 10? I conclude confidently that no, it would not. The replacement of Trident, the access to overhead satellite monitoring capabilities, the defence exchanges that are hidden from public view, the UK-US co-operation over signals intelligence, the Central Intelligence Agency/Secret Intelligence Service/Federal Bureau of Investigation/MI5 liaison and much more would continue as before.
There would be disapproval of Brexit in Washington, and some disappointment too, but the practical consideration of living in a dangerous world and depending on true friends would win out.
MPs recently spent three hours debating whether the American presidential candidate Donald Trump should be banned from the UK, so they can’t really complain if he chooses to reciprocate by expressing his own views on British matters. He has this morning, predicting that Britain will vote to leave the EU because of the “craziness” going on with immigration.
Trump made his comment in an interview with Good Morning Britain’s Piers Morgan. The first extract from the interview was shown yesterday, and the second this morning. The full 40-minute interview will be on ITV tomorrow night.
This is what Trump said about Brexit.
I think that Britain will separate from the EU. I think that maybe it’s time, especially in light of what’s happened with the craziness that is going on with immigration, with people pouring in all over the place I think that Britain will end up separating from the EU. That’s my opinion. I’m not endorsing it one way or the other.
He was also asked about the parliamentary debate on whether he should be banned from the UK. People took his side, he claimed.
There was such opposition from people that live in Great Britain, in the UK generally, in fact all over Europe, the people were incensed at the concept of me being banned for speaking really what they said was the truth.
And, as you know, that ban went nowhere, it shouldn’t have gone anywhere, it was a disgraceful thing but it went nowhere, but a lot of people - and I mean thousands and thousands of people - were tweeting saying you’re right, you’re right, Mr Trump, you are right, and so I don’t know what’s going on over there but I can tell you there is some unrest.
I will post any reaction to this later.
There is only one significant item on the agenda today.
10.30am: George Osborne, the chancellor, gives evidence to the Commons Treasury committee about the budget.
I will be covering the Osborne hearing in detail but I will also be covering other breaking political news as it happens, as well as bringing you the best reaction, comment and analysis from the web. I will post a summary at lunchtime and another in the afternoon.
If you want to follow me or contact me on Twitter, I’m on @AndrewSparrow.
I try to monitor the comments BTL but normally I find it impossible to read them all. If you have a direct question, do include “Andrew” in it somewhere and I’m more likely to find it. I do try to answer direct questions, although sometimes I miss them or don’t have time. Alternatively you could post a question to me on Twitter.
If you think there are any voices that I’m leaving out, particularly political figures or organisations giving alternative views of the stories I’m covering, do please flag them up below the line (include “Andrew” in the post). I can’t promise to include everything, but I do try to be open to as wide a range of perspectives as possible.
Updated
.png?w=600)
