Politics

When George Osborne announced at the Conservative Party conference in 2014 that he would force companies such as Google, Facebook and others to pay more tax in the UK, some of those firms were privately incandescent. As a Daily Telegraph journalist covering the conference at the time, I was witness to a rare example of usually conciliatory American firms eager to critique government policy in robust Anglo-Saxon. Why, they asked, didn’t the UK see the wider benefits of having major digital employers based here, and didn’t ministers understand that they were paying their due taxes where they were founded, in America? In public, technology-friendly commentators suggested the announcement was all

Honesty and consistency; two qualities everyone agrees to value but that are easily jettisoned as soon as maintaining them proves too inconvenient. It turns out they’re not so valuable as all that. So it is with all things Euro-referendum-related. If we are to believe the rival tribunes competing for your affections later this year, negotiating the terms of a British exit from the European Union will either be a doddle or a disaster, with little room for hope in between those twin imposters. Well, perhaps. Sometimes, however, it helps to imagine an alternative but comparable scenario in which, as it happens, you may be less invested. Doing so might make

Given last year’s election was so much about the possibility of the SNP and Labour working together in government, Labour figures will be smiling ruefully at Nicola Sturgeon’s interview on the Andrew Marr Show today, in which she stuck the boot into the party she once suggested a ‘progressive alliance’ with. The Scottish First Minister is of course thinking more about fighting Labour in this year’s Holyrood elections than about the Westminster Parliament, and so she wanted to paint her main challengers as weak and confusing. She told the programme that the party would end up ‘without a shred of credibility’ if it held a free vote on Trident renewal,

With the government still convinced that there’s a better than 50:50 chance of a deal at the February EU Council which would pave the way for an EU referendum in June, the pressure on Tory backbenchers to back the Prime Minister is being stepped up. This week, saw the launch of the Cameron endorsed, pro-EU membership Conservatives for Reform in Europe group. Those involved in this group are confident, as I write in The Sun today, that they will get the support of a majority of Tory MPs. Tory MPs are being left in no doubt as to what side Cameron wants them on come the referendum. The message to

Angela Eagle wasn’t told about a controversial plan to ban companies who do not pay a living wage from paying out dividends to shareholders before Jeremy Corbyn floated it in a speech last week, Coffee House understands. I have learned that the Shadow Business Secretary was not consulted over the proposal, which is believed to have triggered the resignation of the Labour leader’s Head of Policy and Rebuttal, Neale Coleman. Corbyn floated the idea in his speech to the Fabian Society on Saturday, saying ‘another proposal would be to bar or restrict companies from distributing dividends until they pay all their workers the living wage’. It is normal for the Shadow