Politics

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

Tuesday

9 Oct 2012

Conservative conference: David Cameron to warn that Britain must ‘do or decline’

David Cameron’s speech today to the Conservative party conference will be deeply personal, and deeply challenging. I understand that the Prime Minister is going to weave in stories from his own life: pushing his late son around in his wheelchair, and his late father’s own story. He will say: ‘It’s only when your dad’s gone that you realise – not just how much you really miss them – but how much you really owe them. My dad influenced me much more than I ever thought.’ These this-is-who-I-am details will help the Prime Minister talk about his vision for the Conservative party, and his vision for the country too. It’s not

Isabel Hardman

Conservative conference: Liam Fox on what voters want

As Liam Fox addressed a packed Carlton Club fringe this evening on a mezzanine floor in the ICC in Birmingham, a round of loud singing broke out on the floor below. The Prime Minister had appeared at another reception, and guests were cheerily singing ‘happy birthday’ to him. As the PM celebrated his birthday, his former defence secretary was dispensing advice just a few metres above his head on what the Conservative promise on Europe should be in 2015. ‘What I want is to see us keeping faith with the British people and I want to see us having a slogan at the next election which says ‘Back to a

Fraser Nelson

Conservative Party conference: the mood

The notion of “the mood” of the Tory party conference is harder to judge nowadays, when only one in four people here are actually Tory activists. But those I do speak to are quite upbeat. They shouldn’t be, really: the polls are pretty grim, the IMF has today underlined the depressing economic situation. But this has nonetheless feels like a conference fizzing with life. Crucially, this is because of the fringes – not the conference hall. The conversations in the pubs and bars are about events people saw outside the secure zone. Sure, you might get the odd person talking about Osborne’s speech – which was well-received – or making Boris

Isabel Hardman

David Cameron must beware of hitting his dream ‘striver’ voters

Now that the Tories have at least agreed within their own party that they can find £10 billion of further cuts to the welfare budget, they are starting to ramp up the rhetoric on why it’s fair to do this, and how they can achieve it. Yesterday, Chancellor George Osborne said this: ‘Where is the fairness, we ask, for the shift-worker, leaving home in the dark hours of the early morning, who looks up at the closed blinds of their next door neighbour sleeping off a life on benefits? When we say we’re all in this together, we speak for that worker. We speak all those who want to work

Alex Massie

Scottish Tory Leader to Scots: Drop Dead – Spectator Blogs

These days, alas, the only time the leader of the Scottish Conservative and Unionist party makes it onto the front pages of the nation’s newspapers is if she’s made some almighty blunder. Sadly, Ruth Davidson’s speech to a fringe meeting in Birmingham this week was a calamity. That’s the subject of my latest Think Scotland piece: Ruth Davidson’s suggestion, made during an appearance at a fringe event in Birmingham this week, that, in effect, most Scots spend their lives suckling on the government teat is not, I’m afraid, a helpful one. According to the Tory leader: “It is staggering that public-sector expenditure makes up a full 50 per cent of

Fraser Nelson

Any questions for Iain Duncan Smith?

I’m interviewing Iain Duncan Smith today for a fringe event at the Conservative Party Conference, hosted by the Centre for Social Justice. I will be able to grill him for an hour. It’s been quite a week for him, with this rapprochement with George Osborne and continued questions over the viability of his Universal Credit. A year since the riots, it’d be interesting to know what – if anything – has changed as a result the task forces etc that he was telling The Spectator about a the time. But what questions would you like to put to the Secretary of State? Let me know, I’ll put them to him

James Forsyth

Conservative conference: Michael Gove’s facts on the ground

The speed with which Michael Gove is going about his education reforms means that he is creating facts on the grounds, facts which Labour will—I suspect—have to accept by the next election. Parents with children at new free schools and academies are not going to vote for a party that is going to abolish their child’s school. For example, the mother of a child at a Birmingham free school—Geraldine Henry—spoke at Tory conference today in favour of free schools. I expect that Henry would never have expected to find herself speaking at a Tory conference but she clearly felt compelled to come and promote and defend her son’s school. As

Isabel Hardman

Conservative conference: Michael Gove indulges in his favourite sport of trade union-bashing

As I was running the daily leaflet gauntlet at the entrance to the Tory conference this morning, a man thrust a flyer for the Trade Union Reform Campaign in front of me, saying hopefully ‘trade union bashing?’. He clearly hadn’t got Robert Halfon’s memo about not bashing the unions, and neither had Michael Gove when he addressed delegates a few minutes ago. He indulged in his favourite sport and took direct aim at the teaching unions, claiming that some union secretaries had told him not to praise high-performing schools as it risked making other schools feel uncomfortable: ‘How can we succeed as a country when every time we find success

Fraser Nelson

The Spectator debate: George Osborne isn’t working: we need a Plan B

Today’s downgrades from the IMF have overshadowed the Tory conference and pose an awkward question: if George Osborne’s policies were working, wouldn’t they be working by now? Is it time for a Plan B? It’s the biggest issue in British politics right now and we at The Spectator are bringing together two former Chancellors to discuss it with Andrew Neil chairing it. I thought that Coffee Housers might be interested in some details. Alistair Darling is becoming the most powerful critic of Osborne’s policies. Ed Balls’ attacks can be written off as his usual snarling but Darling is more considered and his arguments carry more weight as a result. He

Steerpike

Steerpike at the Tories’: Happy birthday, Prime Minister

What gift do you buy for a man who has it all? It would be hard enough to pick a forty-sixth birthday present for the multi-millionaire David Cameron even if he were not the prime minister; but the fact that he is one of the leaders of the free world makes it even trickier. Boris went with the gift of loyalty this morning, managing to get the conference floor to eat out of the palms of his hands and also heap praise on David Cameron. ‘If I am a mop, Dave, then you are the broom… sweeping away the mess left by Labour.’ George Osborne is the ‘dustpan’ in Boris’s

Isabel Hardman

Conservative conference: Boris Johnson’s speech won’t leave Cameron in a cold sweat

Tory party members were queuing for half an hour to get into the Mayor of London’s box office speech this morning. Even Ken Clarke struggled to get a seat in the nosebleed section of the Symphony Hall. It was the perfect hype for Boris’ campaign to become the anointed next leader of the Conservative party. But as Boris burrowed his way through his speech, joking and punning, sending the floor into paroxysms of laughter in one very cleverly-written passage about the filmmaking industry in Soho, it became obvious that this wasn’t a performance that is going to leave David Cameron in a cold sweat as he prepares his own speech

Isabel Hardman

Conservative conference: David Cameron moves Tories to the common, not the centre, ground

It’s David Cameron’s birthday today, but when James Naughtie suggested on the Today programme that Boris Johnson be sent to a remote country as ambassador, the Prime Minister sounded as though Christmas had come early, too. You could almost hear Cameron’s mind whirring as he considered which country might deserve the Mayor of London. As well as answering questions on the man who last night continued his pitch to become the next Tory leader, Cameron was asked where he was taking his party currently. The policies announced this conference are being seen as a sign of the Conservatives moving to the right, but Cameron described it like this: ‘The Conservative

Monday

8 Oct 2012

Isabel Hardman

Conservative conference: Home Affairs Committee member expresses concerns about police commissioners

I had the pleasure of chairing a fringe event hosted by the Howard League for Penal Reform today on young people and the criminal justice system. The focus for the event was how police and crime commissioners can change the way young offenders are treated. Home Office minister James Brokenshire was very keen to assert that PCCs should be ‘ambitious’ in their plans for dealing with young people. But Home Affairs Select Committee member James Clappison was a little less optimistic, particularly about whether the government is actually pushing hard enough for these commissioners to be a momentous change to policing. ‘I think there are opportunities here, and I think

Rod Liddle

The Tories Vs Scotland

Interesting comments from Ruth Davidson, the chairthing of the Scottish Conservative Party, about her fellow countrymen. Only twelve per cent of Scots, she says, contribute more to the exchequer than they take out in the form of benefits. “The rest lie around on filthy sofas in subsidised homes, watching daytime television while farting, mainlining heroin and stuffing their sad grey faces with pies full of regurgitated sheep gizzards and Windolene.” Actually, I paraphrase a bit there. She didn’t say all that stuff. She just said almost nine out of ten Scots take more in benefits than they generate in wealth. This is, she says, shocking, and the Scots have too

Fraser Nelson

Conservative Conference: Boris delight

You could tell this was the Boris Johnson show because people were smiling when they queued, smiling as they listened and smiling as they left. The mood in the conference hall had been completely transformed: it was as if this were comedy night, and we were waiting for the Prince of Political Standup. He was introduced via a Bond-style video, and made an extraordinary entrance which I tried to record on my iPhone. The quality is not Emmy-winning, but it may give some sense of the mood:- Boris thanked everyone for the Olympics, hailed London as the world’s greatest city and then walked his very fine line of support for

James Forsyth

Conservative conference: Iain Duncan Smith rips into Labour’s welfare legacy

Iain Duncan Smith has just delivered the most political speech of what has been a highly partisan conference. He tore into Labour’s record on welfare, accusing them of having fostered welfare dependency and increased inequality. He said that they had created two nations: one who worked and one who was trapped on welfare. Having done that, he then denounced Labour for having opposed all of his changes to the welfare system, attacking them in moral terms for this. Labour ‘don’t know anything about work do they’ he told the audience to cheers. The flip side of this attack on Labour was an attempt to claim the mantle of ‘social reform’

Steerpike

Steerpike at the Tories: Access denied

Officially the Tories are denying that UKIP is a threat to them. A private discussion with the party chairman about obstacles to a majority in 2015 held last night contained no mention of Farage’s merry men. Yet it seems that Central Office might actually be a little more paranoid than they are letting on. The fringe hosted a panel debate this morning simply tilted ‘Does UKIP pose a threat?’ The Parliament Street think tank had invited a prominent UKIP member to challenge senior Tories on the matter. The only problem was that said UKIPper was told, just hours before the event, that their pass had been withdrawn and access to

Isabel Hardman

Conservative conference: Robert Halfon admits: ‘I envy socialists’

The Conservative leadership is just starting to tap in to the idea that the next election will be about the ‘strivers’, but Robert Halfon and Priti Patel know all too well from their Essex constituencies that what Halfon calls ‘white van conservatism’ is a key battleground. At last night’s Institute of Economic Affairs, the two MPs explained how the Conservatives needed to talk about the cost of living for the ordinary family in order to win in 2015. Halfon outlined how difficult that project was, saying: ‘I wish I was a socialist and the reason for that is if you are a socialist, you have a simple message.’ He said

Fraser Nelson

Conservative conference: Tories find themselves on a different wavelength to voters

BBC Radio Five is broadcast on 909 kHz, but whatever wavelength the Conservative Party is using was not being received by the 200 average voters assembled by Victoria Derbyshire’s meet-the-public programme now held in every party conference. It’s normally the closest that ordinary voters get to the party conferences, inviting frontbenchers to take questions from locals. The results are quite often explosive. Grant Shapps, the new Tory chairman, was the first guest and was inevitably asked about why he ran his business operating under a made-up name. He gave various explanations but the man in the audience wasn’t buying it. ‘My name’s Barry Tomes. That’s my real name, by the

James Forsyth

Conservative conference: George Osborne tells Tories he is not for turning

listen to ‘George Osborne conference speech, 8 Oct 12’ on Audioboo George Osborne began his conference speech by pointing out that two years into government, Ted Heath had flinched on the economy and lost while Margaret Thatcher had kept on and won. Osborne’s message was, I’m determined to be Thatcher not Heath. The Chancellor’s allies clearly knew this was an important speech for him. Several times, Michael Gove — probably, Osborne’s closest friend in Cabinet — started to clap before the applause line had finished been delivered. One strategic objective of the speech was to try and win back the ‘one nation’ mantra that ‘we’re all in this together’