Politics

The first time I checked in to a French hotel with a golden retriever — his name was Gregory, predecessor of the incumbent Douglas — I left him, clearly unhappy, in the bedroom when I went to dinner. Then I realised that every other party already in the dining room included a dog, in some cases a lapdog enjoying morsels direct from its mistress’s plate. So I fetched Gregory, shoved him under the tablecloth and told him to keep quiet. But each time a tasty dish went past, his big hairy head emerged and sniffed the air. Eventually the maitre d’hotel approached. ‘You’re in trouble now,’ I whispered (to Gregory).

   Washington DC [audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_20_Nov_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Michael Lind and Sebastian Payne discuss the growing similarities of the Britain and American right” startat=1350] Listen [/audioplayer]Amid all the commentary about the Republican party’s triumph in America’s midterm elections, a remarkable fact was ignored: in style and substance, the American right is rapidly becoming a lot more like Britain’s. And that might be the key to its success. In the last generation, American right-wingers have stood proudly apart from their counterparts in Europe, Britain, Canada and Australia. They were more religious, and more supportive of mass immigration. But that is changing. Exhibit A is the dwindling influence of the religious right in the US.

In 2006, on the day that the government’s estimated cost for the 2012 Olympics was jacked up from £2.75 billion to £4.25 billion, I promised to eat my hat on the steps of the Olympic stadium if the bill came to less than £10 billion. Although the official figure now stands at a mere £8.92 billion, it is a feast I am going to postpone, because we haven’t heard the last of Olympic overspending. Two weeks ago, the London Legacy Development Corporation announced that the value of the contract with Balfour Beatty to convert the stadium for use by West Ham Football Club is to be increased from £154 million to

Wonderful: Labour has a new slogan on immigration, which appears to be the Conservatives’ old slogan from 2005, the one that Labour said was racist. I have far more respect for any Labour politician who actually defends their record on mass immigration – only a fifth of which was from Europe, incidentally, although that gets at least four-fifths of the coverage – than those who goes along with the current fashion. Someone who said that diversity made us more tolerant and kinder and was culturally-enriching; and that the economic benefits, although they are more helpful to the rich than the poor, are worth the downsides. That mass immigration was a Left-wing thing

PMQs is in a rut. The exchanges between Cameron and Miliband now descend into the trading of insults even faster than they did before and both sides simply use PMQs as an opportunity to trot out stock lines. Miliband was determined to use today’s exchanges to paint Cameron as a kiss-up, kick-down politician, trying to contrast his opposition to the mansion tax with his support for the so-called ‘bedroom tax’. (It is, though, worth remembering that only one of these policies is actually a tax.) Miliband fumed, ‘If you’ve got big money you’ve got a friend in the Prime Minister. If you don’t, he couldn’t care less.’ Cameron, for his

Mark Reckless has landed himself in the soup over comments he made at hustings last night about what might happen to EU migrants if Britain quit the EU. First reported in the The Guardian, the following exchange was captured on ITV Meridian last night: listen to ‘Mark Reckless says he is against deporting existing EU migrants’ on audioBoom