Politics

Read about the latest UK political news, views and analysis.

Monday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Note from Mandelson’s firm warns that SNP will drag Labour to the left

Peter Mandelson and Ed Miliband appeared to have been undergoing a certain rapprochement during this campaign. Mandelson declared recently that Miliband has ‘way exceeded my expectations‘. But a briefing note from Global Counsel, of which Mandelson is chairman, is bound to be seized on by the Tories. The note is entitled ‘Why the SNP will win whatever happens on May 7th’ and goes on to discuss what might happen if the Nationalists end up holding the balance of power in a hung parliament. It warns that ‘English dissatisfaction is likely to grow over time with the consequences of Labour government being sustained in power by the SNP’. It also predicts

Sebastian Payne

Campaign kick-off: 10 days to go

With just under two weeks to go until polling day, the promises, threats and reassurances will kick up a notch as we enter the final stretch of the campaign. The Tories have another 5,000 businesses to back up their case for reelection, while Labour is turning to its favourite weapon of market intervention towards housing. To help guide you through the melée of stories and spin, here is a summary of today’s main election stories. 1. Building for Britain The Tories have tried to paint themselves as the party of home ownership throughout this campaign. But Labour is attempting to seize that mantle with several new policies on housing today.

Sunday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Ed Miliband is right – first-time buyers need a tax cut

I hate to admit it, but Ed Miliband has a point about the need for raising the stamp duty threshold to £300,000 for first-time buyers. (The FT has the story tomorrow, and Sky News has the £300k detail). The tax was invented to give the government a slice of the more expensive housing transactions –  the higher-rate threshold of £250k was introduced in 1997 when the average house cost £60k. Now, the average house is closer to £250k. This failure of stamp duty thresholds to rise with the market has been a way for Chancellors to cash in on the asset bubble. Stamp duty cost homebuyers £9.5bn last year – Osborne plans to jack this up

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Scotland’s two tribes are more divided than ever – they see reality differently

Expectations just keep increasing for the SNP. Today’s Panelbase poll for the Sunday Times puts the nationalists on an eye-popping 48 percent of the vote in Scotland. Labour activists and candidates report better that on the fabled doorsteps the response they’re getting is much better than that recorded by the opinion pollsters. Doubtless, in some constituencies, this is true. But it seems unlikely to be enough. The ship will not go down with all hands but there will still, it seems, be few survivors. This remains a strange election. Ordinarily I’d say the straw-clutchers are hopelessly mistaken. The numbers do not lie. They are worth more than anecdotal evidence and gut-checking

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Cameron’s answer to the passion question

David Cameron has been bugged in this campaign by the question of whether he’s passionate enough, of whether he really wants it. When Fraser and I asked him about why so many people aren’t sure of whether he has the passion for it a few days back, he replied, ‘I don’t know. There is something about me—I always manage to portray a calm smoothness or something.’ He then went on to explain why as a Conservative he wants to know what the plan is, not just what the passion is. As he quipped, ‘plan plus carrying out a plan equals dream. Dream plus rhetoric equals chaos.’ But in a speech

James Forsyth James Forsyth

This election will be decided by the undecideds

The polls could hardly be closer than they are at the moment and the parliamentary arithmetic looks like it is going to be remarkably tight, there’ll be only a few seats in it as to whether it’ll be Cameron or Miliband as Prime Minister. Yet, campaign aides on both sides have been struck by one thing: the large number of undecideds. One recent poll suggested that as many as one in five of those who intend to vote are still undecided. How this group breaks will determine the result. As one close Miliband ally put it to me, ‘The defining moment of this campaign hasn’t happened yet’. The Tory hope

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

George Osborne has squeezed more from the rich than any UK Chancellor, ever

The Sunday Times Rich List is out today – and it says a lot about Britain. Mainly: what type of country are we? One that reads that supplement with admiration, or with outrage? I’d argue that the former, but this runs contrary to the bovine populism being encouraged by Labour. Ed Miliband wants to raise the top rate of tax to 52 per cent which, as he knows, will raise next to no money. The real purpose of that tax rise is to perform a basic populist manoeuvre: identify an enemy (the highly-paid) and then promise to hurt them. Today, it’s landlords: rent would be capped by the government. Like all

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

David Cameron insists Tory campaign has ‘the most positive vision there could possibly be’

There’s nothing wrong with negative campaigning in an election. If you think your opponents would damage the country, then you should point it out. What’s wrong with negative campaigning is when it’s the only sort of campaigning you’re doing, or when the balance appears to be tipping in its favour in terms of your key messages and big attention-seeking posters. The Tories are currently facing accusations that they are doing too much negative campaigning, and so today David Cameron tried to defend that campaign when he appeared on Sky’s Murnaghan programme. He said: ‘And to me, people talk about this campaign, there’s nothing more positive than saying to people: let’s

Camilla Swift Camilla Swift

Andrew Marr apologises for misquoting David Cameron on foxhunting

Is foxhunting David Cameron’s favourite sport? Does he ‘love it’, as Andrew Marr quoted him as saying on his BBC show last Sunday? As I pointed out earlier this week, no, he doesn’t. The quote in question never actually existed, and certainly not in the magazine that it was attributed it to – the quarterly one of the Countryside Alliance. But, to his credit, Andrew Marr this morning apologised to his viewers for misleading them. As he said: ‘You may have noticed that the Prime Minister looked mildly disconcerted when I put to him a quote about his views on fox hunting. Well, not surprisingly. It turns out he never

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Miliband avoids the Scottish question

On the Andrew Marr show this morning, Ed Miliband fended off questions about any post-election deal with the Scottish National Party. He had two lines of defence. First, he said he wasn’t going to pre-empt the election result and that he was fighting to win the election everywhere including Scotland. Second, he was adamant that ‘I’m not doing deals with the Scottish National Party’. But there was no explanation of how he would pilot legislation through the Commons without their support. listen to ‘Ed Miliband on the Andrew Marr Show’ on audioBoom When it came to the economy, Miliband refused to admit that the last Labour government spent too much,

Jason Pack

Miliband’s position on Libya is deeply hypocritical

What Ed Miliband lacks in charisma, he is attempting to make up for in polemic. Tragically for the UK’s future, this represents an ‘Americanization‘ of British electoral politics. In all likelihood, its origins are David Axelrod cynically taking a page out of the Republicans’ playbook. Fortunately, repeated screaming of ‘Benghazi’ as if it were a primordial voodoo incantation, is unlikely to work on this side of the Atlantic. Speaking at Chatham House on Friday, Miliband sought to pre-empt his critics by laying out a cohesive vision for foreign affairs – usually considered his weakest policy area. He preached multilateralism in quite compelling terms, shrewdly articulated the dangers of an in-or-out EU referendum, and summed up the primary threats facing

Sebastian Payne

Revealed: the Tories’ plan to up their ground game in the final 10 days with ‘Battlebus 2015’

Membership of the Conservative Party has halved under David Cameron, leaving him with fewer activists to help him in this election than were available to any of his modern predecessors. So how to fight a Labour Party that has not suffered from the same hollowing out? One answer is to bus in activists, which is being done via Roadtrip2015 — a traveling ensemble of young volunteers who move around the country en mass for a day of campaigning in a key seat. This morning, a new phase of Roadtrip is kicking off as the election campaign enters into the final 10 days. Tory activists are being persuaded to sign up to ‘Battlebus 2015’, a plan to bus

Saturday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The Greek crisis is back, and this time it’s more serious than before

Amidst the hullabaloo of the general election campaign, one thing that has generally gone unnoticed in Britain’s political discourse is the worsening Greek situation. You now have European finance ministers openly talking about the possibility of a Greek default. What has changed is that there is now no goodwill and very little trust between Greece and the rest of the Eurozone. The rest of the Eurozone think that the Greeks are obfuscating and not providing the details needed. While the Syriza-led Greek government feel that the rest of the Eurozone is not providing them with the political cover they need to make a deal. They feel that the Eurozone’s insistence

Sebastian Payne

Tories are doing well in key marginals — but Ukip is on the edge

Lord Ashcroft has released his latest round of marginal polling, looking at some of the constituencies vital to the Conservatives’ hopes of remaining in power. Across the six competitive seats he has polled, there is a swing away from the Tories but this doesn’t mean they will lose them. Three of the seats polled are likely to remain blue: Bristol North West, Colne Valley and High Peak. The interactive chart above shows the findings from each survey. These seats were three-way marginals in 2010 and the Tories thought that the substantial Liberal Democrat vote would be the hardest to tackle. But Charlotte Leslie in Bristol NW has campaigned hard to hold onto

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Spectator subscriber event: Mayday pre-election briefing

Our last five Spectator debates have sold out, so we’re adding a new one at short notice – only for our subscribers. It’s an election briefing on Friday, 1 May where James Forsyth and I will go through the campaign as it looks so far, discuss the latest polling (and how to interpret it), what the campaign chiefs are thinking – and then talk about what lies ahead. There’ll be a cash bar, and we may need the drink. Normally, the events are about £40, and even then they sell out. But this one will be at a special subscriber rate of £12, thanks to the generous sponsorship of the gorgeous Corinthia Hotel, where it will be held. It’s just

Steerpike Steerpike

Video: David Cameron bizarrely switches his football allegiance to West Ham

The Prime Minister’s claim that he supports Aston Villa has never been quite believed by football fans. And today, it seems, he has changed his allegiance – telling an audience (above) that they should support West Ham. CCHQ has not, as yet, come up with an explanation as to why he didn’t say Aston Villa (other than the fact that he’s no more a Villa fan than Gordon Brown was an Arctic Monkeys fan – his biography has plenty references to villas, but none to Aston Villa). But when the explanation comes, Mr S will update. UPDATE: The Prime Minister may have been exaggerating his attachment to football. Here are some quotes, before

Friday

Steerpike Steerpike

Labour is pledging a £1m handout to Scottish foodbanks. Why not English ones?

Gordon Brown is saying some strange things. He is being chased out of Fife by the nationalist genie that he pulled out of the bottle, but snarling at the SNP as he does so. He made an extraordinary pledge yesterday when speaking in his soon-to-be-abandoned home of Kirkcaldy. ‘We can’t wait beyond May 8 so within 24 hours a Labour Government will trigger an emergency plan to tackle hunger in Scotland and immediately pay £1 million to ensure food banks across Scotland are better stocked. This is odd: why not give cash to English ones too? Or can they wait beyond May 8 because they’re, em, English? Mr S has asked about, and there

Julia Hartley-Brewer

Ed Miliband should be careful when discussing foreign policy errors

If someone accuses you of doing something that you haven’t done, there’s a really easy way of convincing them that you are not in fact guilty. The first thing you can do is deny the accusation. Very clearly, emphatically and categorically. Let me give you an example taken completely at random: ‘Are you accusing David Cameron of being personally to blame for the refugee crisis in Libya and hence the deaths of hundreds of desperate people in the Mediterranean?’ Now, can anyone think of a good way of answering that question which would be unequivocal and make it clear beyond any doubt whatsoever that this is not in fact what you

Sebastian Payne

Who is rallying behind Ed Miliband: the undecided voters or Labour supporters?

As polling day nears, everyone is trying to work out which way undecided voters will break. Contrary to what many predicted, Labour and Ed Miliband have had a pretty decent short campaign, although this hasn’t yet led to a polling lead. But the key question is whether Miliband is winning support from the undecided voters. A recent poll from ComRes showed that the Labour leader isn’t viewed particularly well among this group. 28 per cent said they would want to see David Cameron run the country, compared to 16 per cent for Ed Miliband. This isn’t much of a change since before the campaign began. In March, 12 per cent of undecided voters said they would

Steerpike Steerpike

Has the BBC painted its website red?

Dare Mr S suggest the BBC election website is a little skewed towards the red corner? Miliband’s foreign policy foray leads the hub, yet fails to give much coverage of the fact that his ‘attack’ has been criticised from all sides. Of all the top stories, only one could be construed as vaguely supportive of the Tories, while a call from a minor Welsh nationalist to organise an ‘anti-Tory’ coalition is considered more important by the editors than the launch of the first-ever English manifesto by David Cameron and William Hague. And one does wonder why ‘the abuse case’ peer’s party allegiances are not deemed headline worthy? For the record, he’s Labour…