Politics

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

Wednesday

Esther McVey

Labour might not like to admit it but economic growth has created an employment boom

With 105 days to go until the General Election, politicians of all sides will be slugging it out between now and 7 May. The starting gun has been fired and the policy battles have begun. Unfortunately, we are starting to hear a lot of misinformation from the Opposition. When the Labour Party continually talk down the UK’s employment opportunities, it has a negative impact on the confidence of jobseekers across the UK.  On a day when we have seen a new set of milestones – the unemployment rate falling to a six year low of 5.8 per cent, jobs vacancies at a 14-year record high, 30.8 million people in work and

Steerpike Steerpike

Revealed: Michael Gove’s ‘female ballad’ ringtone

After Michael Gove’s mobile phone went off in a Cabinet meeting, everyone’s been trying to find out what the ‘jazzy’ ringtone is. As Mr S documented, even Charles Moore was thwarted in his attempts to catch the Chief Whip out by ringing his phone when they were both at dinner. Now his wife has revealed the woman behind the ‘female ballad’ ringtone in her Daily Mail column. ‘Last week, during quite an important work meeting, an urgent email popped up in his inbox,’ Sarah Vine writes. ‘Not wishing to seem rude by looking at his phone, he instead turned to his latest gadget, a Pebble Smartwatch, which I bought him for Christmas.’ The watch is

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Chilcot delay will feed suspicions about politics, not just the inquiry

Even though publication of the Chilcot report in the weeks before a General Election would have hardly been ideal, it would have been better than it being delayed until after voters make their decision in May. Patrick Wintour’s story in today’s Guardian confirms that the report is being held up while those named in it respond to the allegations against them. Politicians are furious, partly because they know the public will be unimpressed. Nick Clegg aptly summed it up in his letter to Sir John Chilcot last night, saying ‘there is a real danger the public will assume the report is being ‘sexed down’ by individuals rebutting criticisms put to

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Are the Blairites sitting comfortably for Labour’s election campaign?

Lord Mandelson likes to think he knows a thing or two about Labour winning elections. So it’s odd that the man so keen on message discipline should start sticking his oar into the debate about Labour’s policies with just weeks to go before the General Election. Is it that the Labour peer doesn’t think Labour will win and so was throwing caution to the wind by popping up on Newsnight to call the Mansion Tax crude and say the Lib Dems had a better-designed policy? To make matters more bizarre, he found himself being congratulated by Diane Abbott of all people, with the leftwing hopeful for Labour’s mayoral candidacy saying

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Could Labour limit its tuition fee cap to ‘useful’ subjects?

One of the really big policy areas that Labour has yet to resolve before the General Election is how it can lower the cap on tuition fees to £6,000. University Vice-Chancellors have been in talks with the party for a very long time, and have been urging Ed Balls and Ed Miliband to get on with making a decision about their future funding arrangements. One of the things delaying this decision is that there isn’t really enough money to get the cap down to £6,000 for all degrees. A couple of the papers have suggested in the past few days that the party may only lower the cap for technical

Steerpike Steerpike

Newsnight: Has Paxman just taken a shot at Ian Katz?

Since Jeremy Paxman quit Newsnight last year, he has hardly been discreet with regards to his feelings about the BBC’s flagship current affairs show, claiming it is run by 12-year-olds. Now, he tells this week’s Radio Times what programmes he has been enjoying of late, and surprise, surprise, Newsnight isn’t one of them. ‘I’m watching Take Me Out and listening to the World Service, where there’s still real news,’ he says. Paxman’s penchant for ITV’s dating show aside, could he be alluding to the direction Newsnight has taken under Ian Katz? In an interview this summer, the Newsnight editor went so far as to admit Paxman found his ideas ‘infantile’. ‘He’s dyspeptic about pretty much everything. Ideas are flattened. Almost everything you suggest Jeremy will

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Ukip is sticking to the mainstream line on the NHS

One  reason that Ukip seems rather quiet at the moment is that it doesn’t have very much policy to talk about. And one reason for that is that there’s a row going on over the slow progress of the party’s manifesto. The Times today says Ukip has sacked Tim Aker from writing the manifesto – as Seb pointed out recently, he did have rather a lot to do, what with being a Ukip councillor, fighting for the party in a marginal seat and writing the manifesto – because he was running behind deadline. But one thing we can be certain of is that Ukip’s manifesto, when it does come out, will play

Steerpike Steerpike

Coffee Shots: Facebook HQ ‘sceptical’ of Ukip

When Ukip officials arrived at Facebook HQ for a meet-and-greet, they were surprised to be led to a boardroom that went by the name of ‘sceptical’. However, far from a tense affair, Steerpike‘s mole insists Facebook employees didn’t mean anything by it. ‘They swore it was entirely by chance,’ a Ukip source tells Mr S. ‘It was a fascinating meeting.’

Monday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Team Boris are catching ‘interesting fish’

Who are the latest contenders in the Tory leadership battle and how much support do they have? That’s the question that Tory MPs and pundits love to chew over, even though there is no contest. The latest fixation is whether George Osborne has rowed behind the Boris campaign. James looked at this yesterday, revealing that Boris might quite fancy taking over from David Cameron after an EU referendum in 2017. Of course, the funny thing is that there isn’t a leadership contest because David Cameron is currently secure as Prime Minister. And as I explain in today’s Evening Standard, he could be secure for a while longer – where Tory

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Chuka Umunna shouldn’t have lost his temper on TV. But he was right to refuse to comment on something he hadn’t read

Chuka Umunna’s fit of pique at the end of his Sky interview was unnecessary. One of the skills of a politician who fancies being a leader is to look calm and reasonable in the face of unreasonable questions. But to be fair to Labour’s Shadow Business Secretary, there is nothing wrong with refusing to comment on something you don’t know enough about. There’s something very off-putting and insincere about a politician who blags their way through an interview or panel session like an English student pontificating their way through a seminar on a book they never bothered to read. He could have read those detailed media briefings that Labour sends

Sebastian Payne

Green Party up to 11 per cent in latest Ashcroft poll

After overtaking Ukip in membership stakes, the Greens are now snapping at its heels in the polls. According to Lord Ashcroft’s latest poll, 11 per cent are now intending to vote Green — up from eight per cent last week. As the chart above shows, this puts them four points behind Ukip. The party has come a long way since the last election, where they gained just 0.9 per cent of the vote. As Natalie Bennett acknowledged this morning, the Green Party is getting more help from David Cameron than it ever imagined. The natural assumption is that the Green vote is primarily coming from Labour — but its vote has remained steady from last week’s poll.

Steerpike Steerpike

Chuka his toys out of the pram

Uh oh, looks like Chuka Umunna hasn’t been doing his homework. The shadow business secretary walked out of a live television interview on Sky News after he was asked his opinion on a letter Eric Pickles sent to Muslim leaders. The Labour MP, who was invited onto the show to talk about the economy, appeared distressed to be questioned on the issue as he had not read the controversial letter in question. His response was to wave his arm around in a fury before walking off air, as Steerpike’s gif helpfully demonstrates. While Mr S is all for playing fair, surely Chuka should be reading his party’s own detailed media briefing that it sends out

Ed West Ed West

Good question, Mr Bryant, where are the Albert Finneys and the Glenda Jacksons?

James Blunt, the self-deprecating musician who may or may not have stopped World War III, has written an open letter to Chris Bryant calling him a ‘classist gimp’ after the politician named him among the list of unacceptably posh people who dominate the arts. The (privately-educated) Labour MP complained that the arts were too full of Blunt and his ‘ilk’, which the singer criticised as narrow-minded and self-defeating. Before commenting, I should add here that my parents sent me to a state secondary school, but only so I could win ‘prolier-than-thou’ contests on the internet when I’m older. Blunt has a point. Firstly the idea of ‘access’, the idea that

Steerpike Steerpike

Green Party smash their own system

Last week the Green Party announced that their membership has soared to 52,000, thanks to a little help from the free publicity awarded to them by the Prime Minister over the leaders’ debate. However, Steerpike hears that all is not well at Green Party HQ, or their ‘National Office’ as the non-hierarchical collective delicately call it. ‘Our systems have crashed,’ Green peer Jenny Jones was heard loudly proclaiming at their press conference this morning. ‘They can’t cope with the numbers.’ Well that’s certainly one meaning to revolutionary cries of ‘smash the system,’ there was Mr S thinking that you couldn’t go wrong with a carbon free pencil on a bit of recycled

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Why are the MCB complaining about Pickles’s letter to Mosques?

Eric Pickles’s letter to Mosques is pretty anodyne. It is hard to see how it could be objected to. But the Muslim Council of Britain is busy complaining about it. Its deputy secretary general Harun Khan is quoted in The Guardian saying, “Is Mr Pickles seriously suggesting, as do members of the far right, that Muslims and Islam are inherently apart from British society?” Now, if you read the letter it is very hard to argue that this is any way what Pickles is saying. He writes, ‘British values are Muslim values. Like all faiths, Islam and its message of peace and unity makes our country a better and stronger place, and

Toby Young Toby Young

Archbishop John Sentamu is wrong about free schools on every count

John Sentamu, the Archbishop of York, has never been shy about courting publicity. He frequently churns out controversial opinion pieces for the red-tops and, just in case they don’t receive enough attention, he’s in the habit of re-issuing them as ‘press releases’. (You can see a list of the most recent here). He has opinions on almost everything, from same-sex marriage (against) to William and Kate’s decision to live together before their wedding (in favour). But with his latest outburst about free schools, the tabloid bishop has jumped the shark. Free schools, according to Sentamu, only benefit the well-off and divert millions of pounds from more deserving neighbouring state schools.

Sebastian Payne

Watch: Green leader Natalie Bennett backs Cameron on TV debates

What are you afraid of boys? The Green Party posed this question on Westminster’s College Green this morning as they launched a new poster campaign (driven around on pedal bikes, natch) calling for the Greens to be involved in the TV leaders debates. Leader Natalie Bennett also announced that the party’s membership is up to 44,175 today — 52,000 including Scotland. I asked Bennett how she feels about being used by the Prime Minister for his own political gains. She doesn’t seem to mind too much: ‘Mr Cameron is certainly speaking for his own political advantage – but he’s only able to do that because it’s a fair and responsible thing to

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Parties stick in comfort zones for another Monday of campaigning

It’s another election Monday and the three parties are still hanging about in their comfort zones, even though they appear to have moved on to other topics. David Cameron is talking about the economy, but with a softer, nicer-sounding edge that has riled some on the Left because it involves him talking about full employment, which is something Beveridge was a fan of, and pay rises, which is something Labour says it wants more (while backing the public sector pay freeze).The Prime Minister will give a speech promising to expand the start-up loans to help 50,000 more entrepreneurs set up business using a £300 million pot. The Prime Minister wants

Sunday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Why is Nick Clegg so happy?

Nick Clegg always seems oddly upbeat when he’s doing interviews about just how badly his party could do in the General Election. Today when Andrew Marr asked him about Iain Dale’s prediction the Lib Dems will lose at least half their seats, Clegg said ‘I really don’t think thats going to happen’ and that ‘we will do so much better than the pundits are predicting’. The Lib Dems currently have 56 seats (the 57th, Mike Hancock, had the whip withdrawn last year), and this election forecast suggests they’ll end up with 27. The sense in the party is that this will be just about OK, but go much lower than 25 and

Carola Binney Carola Binney

Does Ed Miliband think my generation is lazy, stupid – or both?

According to Ed Miliband, my generation is about to be disenfranchised by the coalition. He’s getting quite worked up about it. On Thursday, he accused David Cameron and Nick Clegg of… “sitting by and watching hundreds and thousands of young people in our country lose their sacred democratic rights.” So what’s going on? By what treachery is my generation being disenfranchised? Well, in an attempt to reduce fraud the government is removing the option to register everyone in a household at once – all voters, young and old, must now add themselves individually to the electoral roll. One of the effects of this is that universities can no longer register students living on campus: