Politics

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

Saturday

Grant Shapps

Labour are shouting from the sidelines. It’s the Conservatives who are delivering for Britain.

Outside of a Wednesday lunchtime, most people very sensibly ignore the Punch and Judy trivia of politics. They want MPs to get on with the job: building a stronger, more competitive economy; doing justice to our vulnerable and elderly; and standing up for Britain abroad. Today it is a Conservative team delivering those things. We are in Government. We have a long-term economic plan. And it is working. It was not always thus. My first run for Parliament was back in 1997. I remember canvassing in the pouring rain, miserably. The mood on the doorstep wasn’t much better. The campaign was long and fruitless. A tense election night was spent

Friday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

The twists and turns of the Miller tale

From tonight’s Evening Blend – a free round-up and analysis of the day’s political events from the Coffee House team. Subscribe here. ‘I think that we should leave it there,’ said David Cameron when asked by reporters today about Maria Miller. Of course, the press won’t leave it there as many suspect that there is something about this that doesn’t quite meet the ‘smell test’ that a leader of a party in opposition once set out. Why has the Prime Minister been quite so warm and supportive towards a minister who failed to co-operate with the investigation into her expenses? Why was she allowed to make such a recalcitrant apology? Former chair of

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The EU is eroding Swiss exceptionalism

Even in Switzerland, the elites are sold on the European Union, though it remains outside. It has a virtually irresistible draw in all European countries for the people that Mr Gladstone disparaged as ‘the Upper Ten Thousand’ (who today probably add up to the Upper One Million). As a result, Switzerland is gradually allowing its exceptionalism — in tax and banking, for example — to be eroded. On the other hand, the Swiss people are stoutly sceptical and have become more so. In February, they voted for a referendum limiting the free movement of EU citizens into their country, and so their EU relationship is now in flux. In this

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Why has Labour’s response to Maria Miller taken so long – and why has Cameron’s been so weak?

The response of both parties to the Maria Miller row has been very strange. Labour has waited until today to make a comment, with Chi Onwurah saying in the last half an hour that David Cameron’s ‘weakness and double standards on the issue of Maria Miller’s expenses are totally unacceptable and completely out of touch’. Labour is warning that ‘we must have the very highest standards in public office’ and ‘there can be no going back to the bad old days of expenses’. But why did it take 24 hours to come up with that response? As for the Prime Minister, why did the man who made political capital out

Charlotte Henry

Clegg lost against Farage, but that’s not the point

Why did Nick Clegg bother debating Nigel Farage? The Ukip leader bagged two decisive victories in the battles. But that doesn’t mean the Lib Dem leader has failed to set out what he wanted to do. Clegg needed these debates to reach out to his base, to motivate them to go out campaigning and vote in May. He didn’t need to ‘win’ in order to do that: he just needed to put the case for EU membership loudly and proudly. He had to remind some of his party’s supporters why they joined the Liberal Democrats and he needs to motivate pro-Europeans from other parties to lend their vote to the

Thursday

Peter Jones

Is David Cameron trying to imitate the Delphic Oracle?

Nigel Farage rather missed a trick in his debate over the EU with Nick Clegg. The Prime Minister has promised us an ‘In/Out’ referendum on the EU in 2017, if the Tories are returned to power. But there is a condition: the referendum will be held (his words) ‘When we have negotiated a new settlement…’ (23 January 2013). The problem is that word ‘When’. Does he really mean ‘If’? As it stands, Cameron’s ‘promise’ has all the hallmarks of the Delphic Oracle. Take poor old Croesus, king of Lydia. The historian Herodotus tells us that he asked the oracle what would happen if he fought the Persian king Cyrus. ‘You will

The Spectator

François Hollande’s France is a preview of Ed Miliband’s Britain. And it’s terrifying

François Hollande and Ed Miliband could be political blood brothers. Neither has held down a job outside politics for any serious length of time. Both have been political bag carriers, graduating to apparatchiks. Both have tried to compensate for their essential blandness by adopting radical left-wing policies. Both now pose as socialists, and tout genuinely big (if dangerous) ideas about capital, labour and society. The biggest difference between them is that Hollande won an election, and has been able to put his politics into practice. So we can look to France to see the kind of future which may await Britain if, as the pollsters and bookmakers believe, Miliband is

Nigel Farage

Nigel Farage’s diary: Comfort for Cameron, and the wonders of German traffic

What a week! I was thrilled to have a chance to confront Nick Clegg but my excitement was tempered with disappointment that neither Cameron nor Miliband agreed to take part — although both were invited. I’d love to have challenged Miliband about the effects of uncontrolled immigration: wage compression, for instance, and the erosion of job opportunities within working-class communities. Why did he chicken out? My bet is he knows these facts are unanswerable. Cameron is, by all accounts, having kittens about Ukip but I think I can set his mind at rest. Our current wave of support seems to be thanks to working-class former Labour voters, which makes perfect sense.

Sebastian Payne

Elizabeth Truss: look at Wales to see what Labour would do with education

Want to see what Labour would do with Michael Gove’s reforms? Just look at Wales, says Elizabeth Truss. At the Spectator’s schools conference this morning, the Childcare Minister used the demolished the Euston arch (pictured above) as a symbol of how Britain went wrong, and its HS2-stimulated rebirth of how this government is making amends. Speaking after a robust lecture from Tristram Hunt, Truss explained how the changes to education in Wales have set a dangerous precedent of what a Labour government might do. She pointed out that after abandoning national testing, Wales has fallen to 40th in international league tables for maths: ‘In terms of accountability, this is one

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

The other awkward May elections and why they matter

After all the excitement of Nick vs Nigel and the endless mutterings in the Tory party about uprisings following the European elections, you might be forgiven for thinking that the European elections are the only game in town in May. But there are 4,161 local council seats up for election on the same day – and the main parties are quite keen to make big efforts to secure a good result in those polls. The Conservatives have been holding campaign days in London, where many of the seats up for election are located, and making those local council seats a focus for the parliamentary party, which descends on different areas

Douglas Murray

We need to know the truth about Gerry Adams’s alleged involvement in the ‘disappearance’ of Jean McConville

Readers will know that I am interested in the subject of post-Good Friday agreement ‘justice’ in Northern Ireland. Having been one of the few people to have followed the possibilities of justice over Bloody Sunday, I also recently wrote about the apparently one-sided amnesties which the last Labour government appears to have given to Republicans not convicted of crimes but counted as ‘on the run‘. It has long been my contention that justice cannot only be applied to one side or one group of people. Investigate the 1st Battalion of the Parachute Regiment for what happened in January 1972 and you have to investigate the leadership of Sinn Fein –

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The major parties don’t get UKIP, and neither does the BBC

So, in the second debate between Nigel Farage and Nick Clegg the UKIP leader won by 69% to 31%, according to the post-debate polls. That, you would think, should be the top line of the story, but it was not the way in which the BBC News reported events. The corporation’s “package” of the debate showed Nick Clegg winning four-nil and the spoken introduction, at the top of the programme, simply stated that the debate had taken place. It is true that at the end of the sequence the BBC’s political editor, Nick Robinson, delivered a fair and honest assessment of proceedings. There are plenty of reasons for me, at

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Scottish Tories have a chance to make themselves relevant at last. Will they be bold enough to take it?

Like everyone else, I’ve often been mean about the Scottish Conservative and Unionist party. I recall suggesting they were the worst, most useless political party in the world. Fushionless and quite possibly beyond redemption. But hark this shipmates, something is afoot and there are, titter ye not, modest grounds for modest optimism in Tory circles. After what was, I think it fair to say, a steep learning curve in her early days as leader Ruth Davidson is coming into her own. She has a poise and a stature that was not apparent even a year ago. The party’s recent conference in Edinburgh was a success and her speech her best

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Two coming revolutions: in election tactics, and in Whitehall

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_3_April_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman discuss how electioneering is changing” startat=1229] Listen [/audioplayer]This is a unique moment in British politics. All three major parties have a realistic prospect of being in power after the next election, but they are all acutely aware that they’re won’t be swept to power. Success will have to be eked out constituency by constituency — so the expensive business of polling specific constituencies, normally left until much closer to the election, is under way for all three. And that’s not all. The Liberal Democrats know that an election that followed the national swing would be a disaster for them. So they are busy

Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

University tuition fees are a tax. It’s time to admit it

Regardless of how many brains David Willetts has got, it’s not surprising that tuition fees are a mess. They’re a mess because they are a tax, and intended to do the sort of job for which taxes were invented, yet are also pretending not to be one. It’s like needing a dog but buying a cat, and then expecting it to catch a stick. It’s madness. This pretence exists because a Conservative-led government did not want to be the progenitors of a stonking great new tax. Least of all one targeted at precisely the sort of graduate professionals who Conservatives so badly need to vote Conservative, in order for there

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Is full employment just another of George Osborne’s political stunts?

‘Full employment’ usually means the lowest achievable rate of unemployment — somewhere south of 5 per cent compared with 7.2 per cent today, or to put it in numbers, fewer than 1.5 million compared with 2.3 million last month. You might think it ought to be a target of every Chancellor of the Exchequer. Only Norman Lamont ever said otherwise in public, telling the House of Commons in 1991 that ‘rising unemployment and the recession have been the price that we have had to pay to get inflation down. That price is well worth paying.’ Now George Osborne has embraced the full employment target, taking a little more wind out of

Wednesday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Polls show Farage as the victor of the EU debate

Tonight’s Clegg Farage debate on Britain’s membership of the EU was far more combative than last week’s. Nick Clegg came out swinging from the start. In a sign of how much Ukip have changed politics, it was Clegg who was behaving like the challenger and Farage the incumbent. But despite this change in tactics from Clegg, the result—according to the instant post-debate polls—was the same: a clear Farage win. Indeed, the polls had Farage ahead by an even bigger margin than last week. The Liberal Democrats argue that these debates were not about Clegg ‘winning’, but of him enthusing the Liberal Democrat base and appealing to pro-European voters. I suspect

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Lib Dem manifesto horsetrading begins

After Tim Farron set out a new position for the Lib Dems on the ‘bedroom tax’ this morning, Labour wants to try to humiliate the party by staging a vote on the policy in the Commons. It was approved long ago, but this lunchtime Labour sources were saying that they would put pressure on the Lib Dems by finding a mechanism to force a vote on the bedroom tax. This is always exciting for the Labour party as they can dig out some lines about flip flops and broken promises, but the chances are that an Opposition Day debate would either be ignored by Lib Dem MPs, or a mollifying

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

PMQs sketch: An old-fashioned punch-up between Cameron and Miliband

Cameron, the king of the mood swings, was on typical form today. He veers between calmness and rage with alarming rapidity. The pattern is always the same. He deals reasonably with Miliband’s opening questions but the mercury starts to rise at around Question Four, and his temper reaches straitjacket level on Question Six. He called Ed Miliband and Ed Balls ‘the two muppets’ for mismanaging the Royal Mail while in office. Their bungling cost the exchequer billions, he said. And they didn’t dare privatise the firm for fear of antagonising angry posties and union bosses. Miliband accused Cameron of flogging the company cheap to enrich the Square Mile. At today’s