Politics

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

Friday

9 Apr 2010

Tories remain on the front foot over national insurance

A copy of a letter that George Osborne sent to Alistair Darling today: Alistair Darling The Labour Party 39 Victoria Street London SW1H 0HA 9 April 2010 Dear Alistair, In the course of today, the Labour Party’s economic policy has collapsed in a heap of contradictions. In the morning, you attacked our efficiency plans on the grounds that they would reduce public sector headcount – but by lunchtime your own Treasury Minister, Stephen Timms, admitted that your own spending plans meant that “there will be some job losses” (The Daily Politics, BBC 2, 9 April 2010). On Monday 5 April you told the Today Programme that there would be “no”

Fraser Nelson

Three lessons for the Tories on immigration

The witterings of Phil Woolas about immigration yesterday – where he accused The Spectator of contorting immigration figures and double-counting immigrants – have landed him in plenty trouble. Stephen Timms was on the Daily Politics today and conceded that Woolas was talking out of his hat. They weren’t our figures, they were from the ONS – and compiled under orders from Eurostat with its Labour Force Survey (LFS) scheme. Andrew Neil has written it up in a blog here. The government is at sea because even ministers in charge of the relevant departments have no idea about the scale of immigration in Britain. This wee farrago brings three lessons for

Daniel Korski

Are the Tories ready for joined-up government?

The Civil Service is readying itself for a new government. The BBC has already reported a discussion of efficiency savings among senior officials. In another part of Whitehall, work is a foot on how to set up a National Security Council should the Tories win. I have in the last few weeks been interviewing ex-ministers and senior officials as research for a RUSI paper, due out soon after the election, on how to improve the government’s security set-up. Traipsing around various departments, a number of interesting conclusions have come to light: – Conservative ideas for an NSC are not the same as the government’s NSID committee, however much ministers say

David Blackburn

Darling admits defeat …?

Curious exchange of the BBC, Alistair Darling admitted that the Tories were winning the opening stages of the campaign: “They might have got their political tactics right for the first day or so but their overall judgment is just plain wrong.” Ben Brogan has more details. This looks remarkably like an admission of defeat on the politics of the National Insurance, which, considering it took Labour 10 to respond, seems an accurate assessment. Not good politics, Darling.-

David Blackburn

Darling in cloud cuckoo land

Labour can’t lay a finger on the Tories over national insurance. And desperation has morphed into hysteria. Alistair Darling has just told Sky News that David Cameron contradicted George Osborne and that the Tory plan is “unravelling”. “He is going to have to find deeper cuts, some experts are saying tens of thousands of jobs will go,” he said. “He’s had to go on to say that he’s going to have to cut which will mean job losses.” Now, Cameron said: “Even after our plans for public sector pay and pensions, benefits, ID cards – yes, it’s still not enough. I accept that.” But that does not contradict George Osborne,

Peter Hoskin

Cameron is Mr Reasonable on Today

Another day, another party leader on the Today Programme. This time it was David Cameron, and his interrogator was Evan Davis. My quick capsule review would be that the Tory leader did quite well, sounding measured and reasonable for most of the twenty minutes – which is certainly better than Brown managed yesterday. But for more, read on… Unsurprisingly, Davis led on this morning’s FT interview with Peter Gershon, the Tories’ efficiency advisor, who has fleshed out some of the party’s spending plans. This was the most aggressive segment of the interview, with Davis asking how many job losses would be incurred by a “£2 billion saving on public sector

Thursday

8 Apr 2010

Martin Bright

Why Labour Needs To Be Much Fleeter of Foot

It is difficult to fault Cameron’s idea of a national volunteer force. While the Labour Party was forced to spend today defending the National Insurance hike, the Tories were able to seize the intiative with a genuinely far-sighted proposal. All the more galling for the government that this idea has been rattling around in Labour circles for at least a year. Cameron has stolen Labour’s clothes on this just as he did on co-operatives. David Lammy will be seething. His ideas for compulsory civic service were promoted in the pages of Prospect a year ago. He has been lobbying within the Labour Party for the policy for considerably longer. Unfortunately,

James Forsyth

Labour’s high risk, high reward strategy on national insurance

Labour today has tried to shift the National Insurance debate from whether you should cut waste to prevent a tax rise, to whether the Tories’ sums add up. When the Tories announced their plan to avoid the worst of Labour’s NICs rise by cutting waste they made a conscious decision not to offer details on how they would make these efficiency savings. As one shadow Cabinet minister explained to me, they had no desire to repeat the experience of the James Review when they were going on Newsnight to argue the toss over individual savings. The Tories think that the argument that government can save one pound in every hundred

Peter Hoskin

The VAT dividing line is growing deeper

Is this a pledge we can count on? After the Lib Dems suggested they wouldn’t increase VAT earlier, the Labour Chief Whip has told ITV’s Lucy Manning that his party won’t either. If so, it’s quite a turnaround from when both Darling and Cable refused to rule out VAT hikes during last week’s Chancellor’s debate. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see a LibLab pincer movement against the Tories now: the two parties who seem to have ruled out VAT hikes against the one which is being being slightly more equivocal about it. As I said earlier, it would hardly be edifying politics. But the real worry is if it

Alex Massie

Cameron’s Tories and the GOP

Via Andrew, I see that Gideon Rachman writes: Like many youngish politicians, Mr Cameron would dearly love to embrace President Barack Obama and to drink deeply from his aura – if such a thing is possible. But the Tory leader has to pretend that the US politicians he is closest too are the likes of Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin. This is a pretense that is increasingly painful. […] From guns to God to taxes to climate change, the Tories and the Republicans are really no longer on the same political planet. This problem would become far more acute if a Tory victory in Britain next month was

Daniel Korski

Win one for the Gipper

A Cameron government has the potential to change Britain – but not much else beside. A Tory loss, however, could change much more. The Cameron Tories are a bellwether for Conservative movements in a number of countries, including the US. If they succeed, they will prove a powerful model for many moderate Republicans who believe their party is in an earlier post-Major phase – angry, divided and negative. If David Cameron fails to defeat Gordon Brown, few Republicans will look across to their British cousins for inspiration. The party will eschew any modernising project for a while longer and stick to their equivalent of IDS. In this scenario, the Republicans

Alex Massie

A Broad Toryism

Speaking at a Spectator debate last night, Tim Montgomerie laid out some of the reasons for thinking David Cameron more the heir to Thatcher than, as some of the old right think he may be, a squishy heir to Heath. I wouldn’t agree with all of it but it’s a good speech and a good case. This bit in particular is a fine summary of the modernisers’ argument: For years there has been an unholy alliance of the Guardian Left and unreconstructed right who only want the Tories to talk about tax, crime, Europe and immigration. […] But added to this traditional mix Cameron also wants the Tories to be

James Forsyth

Hope springs eternal

The Tory press conference this morning, launching their plan for National Citizen Service, shows how they hope to run a two track campaign. On the one hand, they want to be hammering Labour over their plans to increase National Insurance — Cameron called it a ‘a recovery killer, an economy killer, a job killer’ and said that Labour wanted people to pay ‘taxes for government waste’. On the other, they want to be presenting hopeful, optimistic ideas like a National Citizen Service. This fusion campaigning enables the Tories both to be attacking Labour and presenting themselves as the party that is offering a positive alternative. National Citizen Service is very

Alex Massie

Stirring Up Exasperation

It’s a strange business this campaigning lark, isn’t it? William Hague was in these parts this morning. I learnt this from his Twitter* feed. He can’t have spent much time in Hawick**, mind you, since he was soon in Edinburgh as part of a day-long tour of nine Scottish constituencies. Tour, of course, vastly overstates matters. Hague is dropping in on constituencies for a few handshakes, a pep talk to local party workers and, if the candidate is lucky, a few photographs for the local papers. A lot of frenetic activity, then, but it’s hard to see how any of it can reasonably be expected to influence voters. William Hague’s

Daniel Korski

The hyperbole of Westminster

Campaigns are conducted in poetry, former New York mayor Mario Cuomo once said. This one seems to be conducted in hyperbole. Every party is doing their level best to show that there is a difference, and a big one, between them and their opponents. That’s normal. But to do so, they are stretching good arguments beyond what is sustainable. “Brownies” may be a particular mendacious form of hyporbolic campaigning (and governing), but there are bound to be a few Tory and Lib Dem exaggerations on display during the campaign. Exhibit A. The Tories say a hung parliament will doom Britain as the markets will react badly to a potentially unstable

James Forsyth

Civil service discussing Tory efficiency savings

Laura Kuenssberg of the BBC is reporting that senior civil servants met this morning to discuss how they would implement the Tory plans for efficiency savings. Now, it is not surprising that the civil service is discussing how to implement the opposition’s plans. But what is intriguing is who told the BBC about the meeting. If it was the Tories, then no surprise. But if it was the civil service who told the BBC about it, then that would indicate that they want it to be known that they think these efficiencies are possible. My hunch, and it is no more than that, is that it was civil servants who

David Blackburn

The strange case of Charlie Whelan’s Commons pass

Well, now we know. Charlie Whelan enjoys the liberty of Westminster at the invitation of the parliamentary Labour party. Guido points out that it’s highly unlikely Whelan isn’t officially connected to Labour’s campaign. Labour tried to keep all this quiet, attempting to avert an ‘affluence for influence’ story that might undermine Brown’s attempt to turn the election into a referendum on Lord Ashcroft. However, though this should prove bad news for Labour, these stories have little impact outside Westminster. Neither the Ashcroft scandal nor previous Whelan sagas moved the polls.

Peter Hoskin

Labour firing blanks

Labour’s press conference this morning was a classic example of a party struggling to both have its cake and eat it. Not only did we get Gordon Brown, as expected – but he was introduced, and joined, by Alistair Darling and Peter Mandelson. Three heavy hitters to bash out one message: that the Tories’ national insurance plans are a “threat to the recovery”. Or make that one-and-a-half messages, if you include the claim that the Tories couldn’t realistically expect to make the efficiency savings to fund their NI cut this year. There is, claimed the Labour triumverate, a “black hole” where the Tories’ tax and spending proposals should be.

Peter Hoskin

What a difference the start of a campaign makes

In last week’s Chancellor’s debate, Vince Cable refused to rule out raising VAT to help fix the public finances. Now, only a few days later, the Lib Dems are pledging not to do that. What’s more, they’re saying that the Tories’ plans require a raise in VAT. And they’ve even got a ‘VAT bombshell‘ poster to drive the message home. There’s more than a dash of Brownite politics about this – the same seasoning I detected in the Tories’ Death Tax poster. Sure, there have been rumblings that the Tories will raise VAT. But Osborne & Co. have denied that this is necessarily the case in recent days, and it’s

Peter Hoskin

Brown comes under heavy fire on Today

Woah. I doubt Brown will endure many tougher twenty-minute spells during this election campaign than his interview with on the Today Programme this morning. You could practically hear the crunching of his teeth, as John Humphrys took him on over Labour’s economic record; practically smell the sweat and fear dripping down his brow. It was compulsive, and compelling, stuff. Humphrys started by putting a grim story to Brown: that his “handling of the economy was not prudent … your record suggests that the economy is not safe in your hands.” The PM’s mission was to deny all this, and he did so with his usual stubborness and disingenuity. His pitch