Politics live blog – Thursday 9 June

Rolling coverage of all the day’s political developments as they happen 12.16pm: For the record, here is what the Hutton inquiry said about the death of David Kelly. I am satisfied that Dr Kelly took his own life and that the principal cause of death was bleeding from incised wounds to his left wrist which Dr Kelly had inflicted on himself with the knife found beside his body. It is probable that the ingestion of an excess amount of Coproxamol tablets coupled with apparently clinically silent coronary artery disease would have played a part in bringing about death more certainly and more rapidly than it would have otherwise been the case. I am further satisfied that no other person was involved in the death of Dr Kelly and that Dr Kelly was not suffering from any significant mental illness at the time he took his own life. 11.58am: Dominic Grieve, the attorney general, will soon by making a statement in the Commons shortly about the call for a full inquest into the death of David Kelly. We don’t know exactly what he’s going to say, but given that David Cameron told PMQs recently that he thought an inquest was unnecessary – the result of the Hutton inquiry was “fairly clear”, Cameron said – it would be very surprising if Grieve were to call for a full inquest. There has not been an inquest into the death of Kelly, the government scientist who killed himself after being identified as the source of the BBC report claiming that Tony Blair’s government “sexed up” the dossier about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, because the Hutton inquiry took over the role of considering the cause of his death. But some doctors, the doctors, led by Stephen Frost, have complained that Hutton only spent half a day considering the cause of Kelly’s death. They claim that the Hutton’s conclusion that Kelly committed suicide was “unsafe”. In a letter to Cameron, they said refusing an inquest would amount to a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. Lord Hutton’s finding of suicide is clearly unsafe and may, especially given the extraordinary context of Dr Kelly’s death, represent one of the gravest miscarriages of justice to occur in this country. If an inquest is denied, despite all the evidence carefully provided to the attorney general, there is a real and grave risk that your government will be seen as continuing, and being complicit in, an enormous conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. Further, any ‘no’ decision will be vigorously contested in the courts via judicial review by the doctors’ lawyers. 11.20am: You can read all today’s Guardian politics stories here. And all the politics stories filed yesterday, including some in today’s paper, are here. As for the rest of the papers, I’ve already mentioned the Times interview with Tony Blair (see 8.37am) and the Rowan Williams’ editorial in the New Statesman (see 9.35am). Here are some other articles and stories that are particularly interesting. • Douglas Carswell and Daniel Hannan, the Tory authors of the devolution manifesto, The Plan, say in an article in the Daily Telegraph that the government’s plans to transfer power away from Whitehall are being “frustrated by the mandarinate”. Councils are being told by Whitehall how often they must empty bins. Universities are told whom to admit. Local authorities are told how much council tax they can raise. National plans to protect designated wildlife sites are being formulated. Decisions over sea defences continue to be made with almost no regard to the communities who live along the coast. Food hygiene quangos centrally determine the price they might extract from farmers for laboriously inspecting them. There is to be a massive house-building programme on public sector land. The much heralded White Paper on public service reform, which we were promised would “signal the decisive end of the old-fashioned, top-down, take-what-you’re-given model of public services” seems to have been abandoned. Far from revolutionising choice over who provides state-funded services, we learn that the process of public procurement within the public sector is actually being centralised around the Cabinet Office. • Steve Richards in the Independent says David Cameron’s speech on the NHS this week “signals the end of a particular dream envisaged by the political romantics in his entourage”. Cameron is surrounded by a surprisingly large number of Tory romantics. They include his senior advisers, Steve Hilton and Rohan Silva, and influential ministers such as Oliver Letwin. I do not describe them as romantic to be disparaging. On the contrary politics desperately need more like them on the left and the right, original thinkers driven by ideas, vision and with the courageous guile to follow through with policy implementation. Several senior Labour figures tell me they lack the equivalent now. In the case of this trio, and a few others, they transformed traditional Tory values and placed them in a modern setting. They did so much more effectively than New Labour on the centre left, where some values went missing in its modernisation project … There is still enough to excite the romantics in the coalition’s agenda, or so some of them tell me. I am pleased. Politics is managerial enough already without them all leaving in a state of wretched disillusionment. They still hope to implement parts of their programme with more political skill and media preparation in the future. But their day in the sun has passed. • The Sun has splashed on a picture of Kenneth Clarke dressed as a Telly Tubby. Angry Tories last night urged the PM to sack tubby Ken Clarke over his soft sentencing fiasco. MP Philip Davies led calls for the Justice Secretary’s head, saying: “Ken’s been living in Laa-Laa Land.” 11.17am: I missed the fact that there’s a byelection going on in West Belfast today. Henry McDonald has more details. Sinn Fein’s Paul Maskey is expected to win comfortably, replacing Gerry Adams. 10.36am: Here’s a round-up to some of the reaction to the archbishop of Canterbury’s article. (See 9.35am.) I’ve taken the quotes from the Press Association and PoliticsHome. From Vince Cable , the Lib Dem business secretary The two parties of the coalition got substantially more than half the total vote at the last election and the public knew that we were going to have to embark on very difficult changes, connected with sorting out the massive budget deficit problem … The point which he seemed to be making was that there wasn’t enough debate around health reform, for example, which I don’t understand because there’s a very big debate. My party has triggered it, we’re having a pause, rethinking the reforms. So he’s obviously had his views and it’s welcome that he pitches into political debate but I think he’s actually wrong on the specifics. From Downing Street This government was elected to tackle the UK’s deep-rooted problems. Its clear policies on education, welfare, health and the economy are necessary to ensure we’re on the right track. From the Conservative MP Roger Gale For him, as an unelected member of the upper house and as an appointed and unelected primate, to criticise the coalition government as undemocratic and not elected to carry through its programme is unacceptable. Dr Williams clearly does not understand the democratic process. If he did, he would appreciate that elected members of the House of Commons are not mandated. We are sent to Westminster by our constituents to face and address the situation as we find it, to use our brains and to endeavour to act and to legislate in the best interests of those that we represent. From the Conservative MP Matthew Hancock This is one member of the Anglican church. When I go to my church in Suffolk there are people of all political persuasions, so I think we’re talking about the views of one man, rather than representing the Anglican church. From the Conservative MP Gary Streeter I think the people are with us on this and the archbishop, sadly and unusually for him, has ill-judged his attack. I would just guess that most people would be slightly baffled by the archbishop’s comments. From Lord Tebbit , the former Conservative chairman No one would dispute the right of the archbishop to make comments of a political kind in this area – it is part of his job, I think, to do so – and he is quite right that there are policies of the coalition for which nobody seemed to vote and policies for which people voted which are not being carried forward by the coalition, but that is the problem of coalition. 10.31am: For the record, here are the latest YouGov GB polling figures. Labour: 42% (up 12 points since the general election) Conservatives: 37% (no change) Lib Dems: 9% (down 15) Labour lead: 5 points Government approval: -21 9.35am: Listening to the news this morning, you could be forgiven for thinking that Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury, is auditing for the job of leader of the opposition. He has criticised the government in an editorial in the New Statesman, which has described his intervention as “the most significant by a church figure since Faith In The City, an excoriating critique of the Thatcher government”. The Daily Telegraph has called it ” the most outspoken political intervention by an archbishop of Canterbury for a generation”. Several Tory MPs have already taken to the airwaves to denounce him. The editorial isn’t available online, but I’ve now had the chance to read it the old-fashioned way. It’s interesting, and certainly very newsworthy. But it doesn’t bear comparision with Faith in the City, a report that is still being talked about almost 30 years after it was written. (No one will remember this in 30 years’ time; people have already forgotten that Williams launched a reasonably strong attack on the government’s welfare policies only last year.) It is also written in Williams’s characteristic woolly, discursive manner, which makes it hard to rate it as a masterpiece of polemic. But it is thoughtful. Here are the main complaints Williams is making about the coalition. • Williams accuses the government of pursing policies that do not have public support. “With remarkable speed, we are being committed to radical, long-term policies for which no one voted,” he says. He cites education reform as an example of this. • He says the government does not appreciate how much “fear” its policies are generating. The anxiety and anger [that people feel] have to do with the feeling that not enough has been exposed to proper public argument … Government badly needs to hear just how much plain fear there is around … To acknowledge the reality of fear is not necessarily to collude with it. But not to recognise how pervasive it is risks making it worse. Williams also says that it is not enough just for the government to blame everything on the last Labour government. • He says he is concerned about “a quiet resurgence of the seductive language of ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor”. • He says the localism agenda is confused. He says he does not think that localism is just an excuse for Whitehall cost-cutting. But he goes on: “There is a confusion about the means that have to be willed in order to achieve the end.” But there are two other important points to be made about the article. Firstly, Williams praises the government for not cutting the aid budget. Secondly – and more importantly – Williams is also quite critical of Labour. This has not been reflected in any of the coverage so far – the full text of the editorial wasn’t available last night – but Williams is not just having a go at David Cameron. He is also complaining that Ed Miliband has not set out an alternative. In his first paragraph, he says that he wants to encourage a debate – “and perhaps even to discover what the left’s big idea currently is”. He goes on to say that the debate in the UK has become “pretty stuck”. We are still waiting for a full and robust account of what the left would do differently and what a left-inspired version of localism might look like … The task of opposition is not to collude in it [the fear felt about government policies], either, but to define some achievable alternatives. And, for that to happen, we need sharp-edged statements of where the disagreements lie. 8.37am: The Times has published a wide-ranging interview with Tony Blair this morning (paywall), and the former prime minister has also been on BBC News and the Today programme. Here’s a full summary of his key points. I’ve taken some of the quotes from PoliticsHome. • Blair says the EU should have a directly-elected president. He was an unofficial candidate when the EU chose its first president, but the job went to the low-profile Belgian, Herman Van Rompuy. Van Rompuy was chosen by EU leaders, who had an interest in ensuring that they did not choose someone who was going to overshadow national presidents and prime ministers. Blair says a directly-elected president would give Europe the clout to compete with powers like China. If you want to have a debate about the direction of Europe it seems to me very hard to have that on a European-wide basis unless you have some means by which people elect something that is Europe-wide in nature … For Europe, the crucial thing is to understand that the only way that you will get support for Europe today is not on the basis of a sort of postwar view that the EU is necessary for peace. For my children’s generation, that is just a bizarre argument. They don’t see that as a real threat, that European nations will go to war with each other. But what they can understand completely is that in a world in particular in which China is going to become the dominant power of the 21st century, it is sensible for Europe to combine together, to use its collective weight in order to achieve influence. And the rationale for Europe today therefore is about power, not peace. But Blair also concedes that his proposal for a directly-elected president “has no chance of being accepted at the present time”. He also identifies five areas where the EU should forger links to “make us more powerful as a unit”. They are tax policy and reform of the social model; completion of the single market; a common energy policy; a common defence policy; and a common policy on immigration and organised crime. • Blair says he supports Ed Miliband. “Let me say by the way, just for the avoidance of any doubt, I will give him 100 per cent support, and I will always do that for the leader of the Labour party,” he says. • But Blair also criticises the “Blue Labour” philosophy that appeals to Miliband. I’d be worried about indulging a nostalgia which suggests a great emotional empathy with someone when you don’t have a policy to deal with it, and so you end up in a small ‘c’ conservative position. The attraction of a concept like Blue Labour is it allows you to say that there’s a group of voters out there we can’t reach at the moment, so what we should do is really empathise with their plight. But I think you should always offer a way forward for the future. The way the Labour Party wins, is if it’s at the cutting edge of the future, is if it’s modernising. It won’t win by a Labour equivalent of warm beer and old maids bicycling. • Blair reaffirms his opposition to the decision to raise the top rate of tax to 50p. “I wouldn’t have done it,” he says. Miliband has said that scrapping the 50p rate will not be a priority for Labour. • Blair says he supports elements of what the coalition is doing. There are elements of the reform programme that we were doing in government that the present Conservative government are continuing, in other areas they’re not. So it would be bizarre if I were to say, you know I don’t agree with them doing the academy programme — why would I want to say that? • But he also suggests that the coalition is, in the long term, unsustainable. “The only coalitions that work in the end are ones where there’s a genuine coalescence of ideas,” he says. The problem is that the Lib Dems are essentially a leftwing party, he suggests. It’s very hard to fight three elections to the left of Labour and then end up in a Tory government. You can slice and dice that any way you want, but you have a bit of a problem with it, and I don’t really have an answer to it. • He welcomes AC Grayling’s decision to set up a private university charging £18,000 a year. Asked if he is in favour of the initiative, he replies: Yes! Let a thousand flowers bloom. I haven’t studied it in detail, but should it be right that people come forward with new ideas and new concepts? Of course. • Blair says that the west must support evolutionary change in countries in North Africa and the Middle East. What we should be doing is, where countries are prepared to make steady evolutionary change we should back that because the problem with revolution is not how they begin but how they end .and we know enough about chaos and instability in that region to realise where that can lead to … We’ve got to realise, one – we are involved, like it or not. Two – our plan for involvement has got to be one that it’s about, not just about changing the politics of those countries, but changing the economic and social reform programmes of those countries also. • He says there should be a Mashall Plan-style aid package for Egypt. I would focus on Egypt very clearly at the moment and say we really do need a type of Marshall Plan, a huge plan of economic and social reconstruction to help that country get to where its people really want it to get to. • He rejects the suggestion that there is any need for a new inquest into the death of David Kelly. (Dominic Grieve, the attorney general, will make an announcement about this later.) There was an inquiry which went for six months headed by a senior Law Lord … I think what he will focus on is whether there really is anything left from the inquiry that went over six months and was one of the most detailed inquiries that has taken place. • Blair says that he does not know if his phone was hacked. 8.26am: Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury, has taken a swipe at the coalition today in an editorial in the New Statesman . And we’ve also had an intervention from one of Britain’s other great godly figures, Tony Blair. In a new foreword to the paperback edition of his autobiography, he has said the west needs a wider plan to respond to the Arab spring . Blair has also given a wide-ranging interview to the Times, and he has been giving interviews this morning to BBC News and Today. I’ll provide a full summary shortly. Otherwise, it’s a fairly routine day. David Cameron is visiting Northern Ireland, where he will address the Northern Ireland assembly . There’s a written ministerial statement on royal air travel, which could be interesting. And here are the items in the diary. 10am: William Hague , the foreign secretary, hosts a UK/South Africa bilateral forum. 10.30am: Damian Green , the immigration minister, publishes a “work routes to settlement” consultation. Around 12pm: Dominic Grieve , the attorney general, announces his decision about whether or not to hold a full inquest into the death of David Kelly. Today as usual, I’ll be covering all the breaking political news, as well as looking at the papers and bringing you the best politics from the web. I’ll post a lunchtime summary at around 1pm, and another one in the afternoon. Andrew Sparrow guardian.co.uk

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