Politics

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

Lloyd Evans

PMQs sketch: Cameron and Miliband squabble over the NHS, while saying nothing

It didn’t work. But it was a good idea. David Cameron prepared an ambush for Ed Miliband at PMQs today. The trouble was he attacked the Labour leader for a vice he himself has mastered with conspicuous aplomb: question dodging. Miliband is clearly in trouble. He’s using his only remaining strength, the NHS, to prop up his burgeoning weaknesses. Expect this to continue till next May. There’s always a calamity somewhere in the NHS and for Miliband, ill tidings are like gold dust. He painted a picture of a basket-case health system that would have shamed a failed state in the Middle Ages. Cameron, he said, wasted billions on a

Nick Clegg stakes the middle – again – but is it the sweet spot for Lib Dems?

Speaking at a south London primary school this morning, Nick Clegg firmly reiterated the Lib Dems’ equidistance between the two other major parties. Before an assortment of public-sector workers, Clegg attacked the potential ‘reckless borrowing’ of Eds Balls and Miliband, as well as George Osborne asking ‘the working poor to bear the brunt’ of cuts. ‘In the centre,’ he said, ‘my party, the Liberal Democrats, we believe in sound public finances, supporting strong public services.’ Stop me if you’ve heard this before. What was (sort of) new was Clegg stating that, ‘once we’ve balanced the books, clearing the so-called structural deficit, the Liberal Democrats will increase public spending in line

Steerpike

Gunpowder, treason and caviar – selling out in Westminster, Guido style

If you’re going to sell out to the establishment, you might as well do so on an industrial scale. As the PM told the Guido Fawkes blog’s ten -ear anniversary party at the Institute of Directors last night, via video link, ‘what better way’ to celebrate ‘rejecting’ the cosy political classes than a posh dinner of caviar and champagne in the heart of Westminster. Guy Fawkes would have been turning in his grave, as cabinet ministers including Francis Maude and Liz Truss, and mysterious billionaires such as Michael Hintze and Lord Ashcroft, along with 200 of Westminster’s finest, came to pay homage to a decade of sniping from waspish troublemakers.

James Forsyth

Ukip’s unsavoury Polish ally in the European Parliament

One of the best arguments against European political integration is the people with whom British political parties end up allied in the European Parliament. For reasons of parliamentary influence and, let’s be frank, money, British parties don’t want to sit on their own, so instead sit as part of broader European groups. Now, all of these groups contain MEPs whose views would be considered distasteful in Britain. But even by this standard, Ukip’s latest recruit to its group seems pretty extreme — Robert Iwaszkiewicz comes from a party that even Marine Le Pen refused to do business with. The leader of his party, the Polish Congress of the New Right,

Martin Vander Weyer

John Humphrys and the BBC’s disdain for market capitalism

Last week’s market tremor, provoked by renewed fears of eurozone stagnation and a slowdown in global growth, was serious enough for IMF chief Christine Lagarde to feel the need to pronounce, in her most soothing tone, that it was ‘maybe at this stage an over-reaction’. But if you were listening to the Today programme on Saturday morning, you might have thought it was all a bit of a joke — and one that served irresponsible investors right. In the absence of economics editor Robert Peston and his almost invisible successor as business editor, Kamal Ahmed, John Humphrys conducted a notably flippant interview with ‘one of the world’s most influential investors’,

Cameron could win in 2015 if he took EU withdrawal seriously … but he won’t

Imagine if David Cameron actually meant it. Imagine if he really did follow through with his implied threat to campaign for Brexit in the absence of better terms from Brussels. You can picture the televised address. An oak-panelled background with a large union flag hanging sedately in the corner, the PM with that furrowed house-captain expression he sometimes does. The script pretty much writes itself. ‘All of you know how hard I tried to secure a new deal. I was often criticised for being too conciliatory, but it was my duty to do whatever was in my power to reform the EU. I have to tell you today that the

Moscow may not need London, but does London need Moscow?

According to an adviser to Russian Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov, sanctions-hit Moscow intends to slowly move the finance of state companies and political players away from London, Zurich and Frankfurt toward Hong Kong, Shanghai and Singapore. ‘We think we can match what we lose from the West with what China offers,’ the adviser told Politico. The Cameron government hit back with anonymous quotes in the same Politico story, dismissing the notion that Chinese financing could replace Western money: ‘The Chinese cannot and will not give them this money.’ Carl Bildt, who also spoke to the magazine, seconded the emotion, noting the ‘great fanfare’ when Russian officials land in Beijing,

The UK doesn’t need Barroso’s ‘positive’ messages about the EU

What a godsend to Ukip José Manuel Barroso must be.  On his recent short visit to the UK he not only managed to tell the British public that limits to immigration (desired by the overwhelming majority of the British public) would be ‘illegal’.  He also managed to tell us that if we left the EU, Britain would have ‘zero’ influence in the world. I do wonder who bureaucrats like Mr Barroso think they are going to persuade.  Are they simply relying on swaying or scaring us on the presumption that we have no historical knowledge or memory?  Because this latest message can’t possibly work, can it?  Most British people don’t

Melanie McDonagh

Turkey in Europe? Now there’s a migrant backlash waiting to happen

Well, I don’t know how José Manuel Barroso came across in the broadcast accounts of his address to Chatham House today but in person the man was geniality itself and rather impressive with it. He shares the mildly irritating tendency of EU bigwigs to attribute to the European Union developments that would have happened without it – recalling that within memory, Europe had moved from totalitarian regimes in half of its states to a democratic and peaceful unity. But in general, he gave the impression of trying to be as straight as he could with his answers. In laying stress on Britain’s freedom to stay outside the eurozone and the Schengen

James Forsyth

Nick Clegg’s pro-European arguments lack the nuance needed to win over the electorate

At his press conference this morning, Nick Clegg told Jason Groves, ‘Do you really think Washington is going to bother picking up the phone if we can’t even punch above our weight in our own back yard?’ This must be one of the most absurd bits of political hyperbole in recent years. There’s an argument to be had about whether or not Britain would be less influential in Washington if it left the EU. But the idea that the Americans wouldn’t bother to even pick up the phone to a country that’s a permanent member of the UN Security Council is just risible. One of the real problems for pro-Europeans

Ed Miliband’s windfall tax on tobacco to fund the NHS is economically illiterate

The ‘windfall tax’, a concept introduced in the UK by the Blair government, is by definition a one-off seizure of revenue from a profitable industry, to fund an invariably unprofitable but popular project. It has been justified as putting ‘right a bad deal’ on the excesses of profits of unpopular industries. Between 1997 and 1998, Gordon Brown raised £5 billion from privatised utility companies to fund the Welfare-to-Work Programme. Today we have face another well-intentioned policy initiative, of ensuring every NHS patient is guaranteed a cancer test within 7 days, supposedly to be funded by a windfall tax on tobacco companies. Labour’s incoherent economic policy is enough to challenge whether

Nick Cohen

Britain is a world leader in exporting creeps

The British recruits who have joined Isis are not exceptions. They flourish in a culture in which it is so commonplace to offer support to authoritarian regimes and movements that few bother to condemn it. Free speech ought to mean the freedom to challenge and criticise in all except the most tightly defined circumstances. Instead in Britain tolerance has become indifference; a lazy desire to live in our comfortable bubbles. The dominant culture views vigorous criticism as rude or insensitive – or, to use that popular and completely meaningless school-prefect putdown, “inappropriate.” More often that not, criticism is taken down and used as evidence of the critic’s failings, his or her

Happy Sunday, Nigel Farage – Barroso snubs Cameron’s migration cap

Everyone’s favourite unelected European was doing the broadcasting rounds this morning, popping up on the BBC’s Andrew Marr show to tell David Cameron that he can forget any plans to cap the number of EU immigrants in Britain. Here’s what José Manuel Barroso had to say:- “Any kind of arbitrary cap seems to be not in conformity with Europeans laws. For us it is very important – the principle of non-discrimination. The freedom of movement is a very important principle in the internal market: movement of goods, of capital, of services and of people. By the way, I remember when prime minister Cameron called me to ask the commission to be tough ensuring the

James Forsyth

David Cameron and Ken Clarke clash over Ukip and immigration

Ken Clarke is one of the biggest beasts left in the Tory jungle. He had been a fixture in every Tory government since Ted Heaths time until Cameron retired him at the last reshuffle. But Clarke is clearly deeply concerned with Cameron’s strategy at the moment.   On Tuesday night, at a meeting of the Tory parliamentary party, Clarke warned Cameron that by talking up immigration so much, he was only helping Ukip. He argued that the public have an ‘insatiable appetite’ for clampdowns on immigration and so the Tories could never match Ukip on this. He said that, instead, the Tories should be talking about their strongest suit, the

Margaret Thatcher would expect the Tories to retake control of Britain’s borders

In a 1978 interview to mark her third year as leader of the Conservative Party, Margaret Thatcher addressed public concerns with immigration, stating that ‘people are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped’. Goodness knows what word she would use to describe the situation we face today. Anyone who has knocked on doors or surveyed their constituents in recent years will tell you the public have had enough. Immigration into the UK is the number one concern to the British public and, in my judgment, a party that does not address it will not win. In 2003 427,000 people arrived in Britain. In the years that followed

Ed West

We may have reached peak manufactured outrage over Freud

When I first learned about Athenian democracy as a teenager I was baffled that they could have decided government positions by lottery; what was to stop someone totally unsuitable and useless from ending up in control? But then I look at the current Labour front bench and think, how bad could it be? I’m thinking in particular of Shadow Leader of the House Angela Eagle, whose performance on Question Time last night was a perfect illustration of how low the tone of so much political debate is – especially that involving manufactured outrage. The outrage in question was over Lord Freud’s comments about the disabled and the minimum wage, which Labour cooked up in

Isabel Hardman

Why the Tories think they can win in Rochester

One of the bits of their Parliamentary party meeting this week that cheered Conservative MPs the most was a speech by Tracey Crouch on why the Tories could win the Rochester and Strood by-election. Many of her colleagues who like to spend their spare time staring at spreadsheets are sincerely worried that the party could lose the seat, leading to all hell breaking loose in the party. Crouch, who represents the neighbouring constituency and will act as the campaign aide to the candidate once she is selected (the shortlist in the postal primary is a choice between two women), told the room that the demographic of Rochester favours the Conservatives

Isabel Hardman

Labour’s football policy reveals what the party really thinks about business

One of the few things that brought real joy at the Lib Dem conference last week was the party passing a football policy that included a lament about the sport’s focus on winning and the danger of an influx of overseas investment into the hugely successful Premier League. But the Labour party clearly thought that this policy, mocked by so many, was actually something it should be considering too, and has announced its own football policy. Presumably on the basis that niche Lib Dem policies are apparently a good thing for Labour to mimic, goldfish will be next. The party wants clubs to give supporters’ trusts the power to appoint

Isabel Hardman

Labour has a better-than-expected week, but the party remains shaky

This week has gone much better for Labour than many of its MPs thought it would. They started the week in very poor form indeed, grumpy after a bad conference, bruised after the narrow Heywood and Middleton result, and braced for good jobs figures to be published shortly before a very challenging PMQs. But the party has narrowly avoided real meltdown once again. Had Ukip won Heywood, Labour would be in chaos, but it didn’t and instead those Labourites who do worry a lot about Ukip are now even more worried, which is still infinitely preferable to party uproar over a lost seat. Had Ed Miliband had a poor showing