Politics Archives

Saturday

17 Oct 2015

The strangest thing about the SNP conference is how normal it is

The SNP conference has had to get bigger as the party has grown. Those who’ve been coming for years are a tad unsettled by quite how big and slick this event is. The exhibition hall is much bigger and is packed with lobbyists and big corporate stands, including a McDonald’s stall. The hall is bigger, the fringe events organised by lobbyists, too, and at first glance, it looks rather like a mainstream party conference: not one packed with eccentricities like the Ukip or Lib Dem conferences. That’s unsurprising given the SNP is a party of government and given it has a chunk of MPs in Westminster. But all of the

Friday

16 Oct 2015

Steerpike

SNP conference 2015, in pictures

This year’s SNP conference has proved to be a somewhat tame affair with Nicola Sturgeon playing down talk of a second independence referendum. While hacks hoping to meet the party’s army of cybernats have so far been left disappointed, Mr S has compiled a selection of photos showcasing the slightly stranger elements of this year’s conference:

Isabel Hardman

Angus Robertson: Older voters took longer to persuade in the referendum than we predicted

The SNP didn’t win the independence referendum, but is still talking about the lessons it can learn from what happened a year later. That’s because it wants to win the next one – and everyone at this conference believes that the next referendum only has question marks about when, not if, it will happen. SNP Westminster leader Angus Robertson suggested at a fringe organised by The Times this lunchtime that two major lessons he’d learned from last year’s result were that older voters would not be persuaded to vote ‘Yes’ as easily by younger generations than he had imagined they would be, and that the ‘Yes’ campaign failed to communicate

Kate Maltby

The Tories can’t allow Corbyn a monopoly on morality

Amber Rudd will be keeping a low profile this weekend. The sight of a working mother on Question Time, tearfully confronting the Energy Secretary over cuts to working tax credits, won’t have made easy viewing for the Tory press machine. Earlier this month, at Conservative Party Conference, George Osborne reiterated again and again that core Tory message, so ardently championed by Harlow MP Robert Halfon and groups like Bright Blue: this is the (real) party of hard-working people. So last night’s former Tory voter was heavily on message, until suddenly, she wasn’t. ‘I work bloody hard for my money to provide for my children, to give them everything they’ve got…

James Forsyth

The Tory party is now at ease with Margaret Thatcher

Last night, George Osborne interviewed Charles Moore to mark the publication of the second volume of Charles’s magisterial biography of Margaret Thatcher. You can watch the whole thing on the Policy Exchange website but one of the most striking things about the event, apart from Charles’s subtle needling of the Chancellor, was the questions that Osborne felt able to ask. He raised the issue of Thatcher’s legacy for the Tories in the north and Scotland, the poll tax and the question of when she should have gone. Even a few years ago asking these questions would have prompted a row, or at least some disquiet in the audience which had

Isabel Hardman

Labour whips persuade Corbyn to keep them

The Labour leadership has abandoned plans to effectively neuter the party’s whips office after realising it is quite useful, Coffee House has learned. I understand that John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn had considered making the whips’ office more of an administrative entity which didn’t try to herd MPs into the right lobby. There had also been plans afoot to get rid of Rosie Winterton, the party’s chief whip, as she had initially been identified as someone hostile to a Corbyn leadership who represented the old way of doing things. But the vote on the fiscal charter this week was much less troublesome than the Labour leadership had anticipated, thanks to

Sebastian Payne

Nicola Sturgeon explains how a second independence referendum could be ‘unstoppable’

Nicola Sturgeon has a plan about how to achieve another independence referendum, even if there won’t be a pledge for one in the SNP’s next manifesto. On the Today programme, Sturgeon pointed the finger at the Tories in Westminster — the bogeymen she believes will help the nationalists make the case for independence: ‘I think we do what we have done over a period of years: we continue to make the argument for the economic and social and political case for Scotland to be independent country and I believe very strongly the onus is on those who support independence to do that. I also though happen to think that there will be things our opponents

Thursday

15 Oct 2015

Isabel Hardman

SNP toys with Labour by announcing troublesome Trident vote

The SNP are very, very happy that they now have 56 MPs in Westminster. But to listen to their conference in Aberdeen today, you’d think they were happiest that Labour is having a miserable time in the House of Commons. It wasn’t just Nicola Sturgeon’s speech, covered here, that showed their joy. It was also the ‘Westminster Hour’ session that the party ran later in the day, featuring a number of newly elected MPs, and the party’s Westminster group leader Angus Robertson and finance spokesman Stewart Hosie. Angus Robertson in particular gave the impression that he was enjoying the misery of the Labour party and the SNP’s hand in that

Sebastian Payne

The first big EU referendum battle: Will Straw vs. Dominic Cummings

The two major EU referendum campaigns have gone public over the last week: ‘Vote Leave, Take Control’ and ‘Britain Stronger In Europe’. Both camps have formidable campaigners at the helm: Dominic Cummings for Vote Leave and Will Straw for Stronger In. They both passionately believe in their causes and are prepared to do whatever it takes to win. Cummings is renowned for his tenure as Michael Gove’s special adviser, where he successfully took on the education ‘blob’, the Whitehall machine and some in his own party. Straw founded the Left Foot Forward blog, before working at the IPPR think tank. He also stood as the Labour candidate in Rossendale and Darwen at the last general election. Many are wondering what

Melanie McDonagh

The EU is sucking up to Turkey to help reduce migration – but it could seriously backfire

You might have thought, mightn’t you, that a million arrivals in a year to a single European country, Germany – well, more than 800,000 and counting – would be enough to be going on with, wouldn’t you? After that, you wouldn’t actually be going out of your way to solicit more incomers into Europe in the long term, even if you were going to be sensible about the influx and were admitting refugees on a purely temporary basis until they could safely return home? But that’s not how the EU works. Turkey at present hosts about two million refugees, mostly from Syria. EU governments would obviously prefer them not all

Steerpike

Diane Abbott earns herself a new nickname

Since Jeremy Corbyn was elected as Labour’s new leader, few of his colleagues have been more supportive than Diane Abbott. As well as defending John McDonnell on the Today show this week over his fiscal charter U-turn, the shadow secretary for international development — who reportedly once enjoyed a romance with Corbyn — took it upon herself to defend Corbyn’s honour at a PLP meeting last month when Jess Phillips criticised him over the lack of women in his shadow cabinet. With Phillips responding by telling Abbott to f— off, it’s safe to say that Abbott’s new role as Corbyn’s champion has not gone down well with some Labour MPs. In fact, one

Alex Massie

Devolving abortion laws to Scotland is a poison pill

The thing about politics is that it is, you know, political. One of the consequences of Labour’s Scottish immolation is that Conservative ministers no longer feel the need to consult Labour grandees about what to do with Scotland. Gordon Brown’s advice is no longer required; the voices of Douglas Alexander and Alistair Darling need no longer be heard. The government, even with its slender majority, can do as it wishes. If those wishes involve a measure of mischief-making then so much the better. That is part of the context within which the government’s decision to amend the Scotland bill to permit Holyrood to legislate on abortion rights should be understood. It is,

James Forsyth

When will the EU referendum be?

David Cameron is in Brussels today with the European Commission not hiding its irritation at the slow pace of the British renegotiation. One member of the Cabinet committee handling the renegotiation admits that ‘We were hoping to be further ahead than we are now’. Though, they blame the hold-up not on Britain being unclear about what it wants but on the migrant crisis taking up the time and attention of European leaders and the EU institutions. The upshot of all this, though, is that the date for the referendum is slipping back. At the moment, autumn 2016 is the government’s preferred date. But members of the Cabinet, including those on

Isabel Hardman

Sturgeon tries to calm nerves about another referendum

One of the key aims of this SNP conference in Aberdeen is for the party to reach out to those who are worried that voting for the party in the Holyrood elections will raise the spectre of a second referendum that many voters are wary of, given how divisive the first one was in some families and communities. To that end, Nicola Sturgeon was careful to use her speech to reassure nervous listeners that the SNP wasn’t planning another referendum any time soon: ‘To propose another referendum in the next parliament without strong evidence that a significant number of those who voted No have changed their minds would be wrong and

Isabel Hardman

Nicola Sturgeon taunts ‘divided’ Labour party

Remember those Tory posters that put a tiny Ed Miliband in Alex Salmond’s coat pocket? Well, it’s only five months since the general election, but Nicola Sturgeon doesn’t seem all that keen to put Jeremy Corbyn in her handbag. She seemed to suggest that she had given up on being able to work with the new Labour leader, saying: ‘You know, there is much that I hoped the SNP and Jeremy Corbyn could work together on. But over these last few weeks, it has become glaringly obvious that he is unable to unite his party on any of the big issues of our day.’ She described Labour as ‘unreliable, unelectable

Isabel Hardman

Nicola Sturgeon: SNP needs to talk about governing

SNP members are gathering for the first day of their party’s autumn conference in Aberdeen. The party is keen to trumpet quite how much has changed in a year, and it’s not just proud of its 56 MPs. Last night it released ‘figures showing the scale of its growth since the referendum’. These include the conference hall having four times as many seats as it did last year (from 1,200 to 4,765), the exhibition space is three times the size, there are three times as many fringe meetings and a media centre six times the size ‘to accommodate over 500 members of the media’. (The press room is a rather

Steerpike

Boris Johnson’s history of violence

Oh dear. With Boris Johnson needing to mount a political comeback pretty soon in order to have any hope of stopping George Osborne’s bid to be the next Conservative leader, the Mayor of London could do with some good PR. So unfortunately an incident that occurred on his trip to Japan is unlikely to prove helpful. Johnson was filmed knocking over a 10-year-old Japanese schoolboy during a ‘friendly game’ of rugby. With the boy, who is called Toki Sekiguchi, saying that he only felt a little pain, Mr S suspects he may have got off lightly given Boris Johnson’s history of violence. 2. Last year during a charity football match, Johnson took down a

Steerpike

Watch: Richard Burgon’s car-crash Channel 4 interview

As Labour’s new shadow City Minister, Richard Burgon will be hoping to prove that his party isn’t as anti-business as they were seen to be in the last election. Alas, his interview with Cathy Newman on Channel 4 news last night will have done little to help his cause. Burgon — who was one of the MPs to nominate Jeremy Corbyn in the Labour leadership election — struggled during the interview in which he tried to defend John McDonnell over his fiscal charter U-turn: ‘If people don’t change their view when further evidence comes before them then they’ve got some tough questions to answer. Labour is an anti-austerity party. This is

James Forsyth

Could George Osborne come out for the Out campaign?

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/thedisasterofthesnp-silliberal-one-partystate/media.mp3″ title=”James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman discuss the current state of the EU referendum” startat=1038] Listen [/audioplayer]Westminster may have been guilty of ignoring the Scottish referendum until the last minute, but no one can accuse it of doing the same with the EU one. No one knows when this vote will take place, yet every conversation about the politics of this parliament revolves around the subject. The referendum, and its aftermath, will determine not only whether Britain stays in the European Union but also who the next prime minister will be and whether the Tories win a landslide in 2020. The In and Out campaigns are up and running,

Nick Cohen

What Scottish professors have to fear from Nicola Sturgeon’s power grab

In the grounds of Edinburgh’s Heriot-Watt University stands a one-tonne sculpture. Roughly hewn and about five feet high, it carries in its top corner an ill-carved sun. Beneath it are some words of Alex Salmond, half-sunk in the sandstone, as if they were the thoughts of a Scottish Ozymandias: ‘The rocks will melt with the sun before I allow tuition fees to be imposed on Scottish students.’ This clunky celebration of SNP -policy should raise a few doubts. Free higher education is not free for all in Scotland. Edinburgh can afford to pay the fees of only 124,000 students in Scottish universities. Their contemporaries might have the grades, but they