Politics

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

Wednesday

Matthew Sinclair

Ed Miliband is deliberately misleading ‘you and me’ on the non-dom rules

When he announced Labour Party proposals for changes to the non-dom rules, Ed Miliband tried very hard to be as misleading as possible without lying. He seems to have failed. He said that non-doms ‘aren’t required to pay taxes like you and me’. They are. Non-doms are required to pay the same UK taxes as the rest of us on their UK income and foreign income remitted to the UK. Most of us don’t have any non-UK income, let alone non-UK income which we do not wish to remit to the UK (regardless of the tax treatment, it would mean we couldn’t spend it here) and therefore we do not

Steerpike Steerpike

Is Ed Balls running scared from debating George Osborne?

When Ed Balls appeared alongside George Osborne on the Andrew Marr Show earlier this year, the Shadow Chancellor told viewers how much he wanted to have a TV debate with the Chancellor. Balls was so keen that he made Osborne shake on a debate live on air. ‘In fact I’d like to go further,’ he cried. ‘George and I do not need the broadcasters to sort things out. George is not a coward.’ Indeed Osborne is not a coward, but could it be that Balls is a chicken? Mr S only asks as word reaches him that plans for a Chancellors’ debate this week have been shelved after Balls demanded

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Ed Miliband pledges to abolish non-dom tax status

Ed Miliband will tomorrow pledge to abolish the non-domicile rule which allows very wealthy people to avoid paying tax on much of their income. The Labour leader will say: ‘There are people who live here in Britain like you and me, work here in Britain like you and me, are permanently settled here in Britain, like you and me, but aren’t required to pay taxes like you and me because they take advantage of what has become an increasingly arcane 200-year-old loophole. There are now 116,000 non-doms, costing hundreds of millions of pounds to our country, it can no longer be justified, and it makes Britain an offshore tax haven

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Three ways the Scottish leaders’ debate will affect the UK general election campaign ​

Tonight’s Scottish debate isn’t going to fundamentally alter the dynamics of this general election campaign in Scotland. But it will reverberate through the UK-wide general election campaign. Both Ed Miliband and David Cameron have been left with questions to answer by their Scottish leaders while Nicola Sturgeon has made clear the price she intends to try and extract for supporting a Labour government. In heated exchanges with Sturgeon about the economy, Jim Murphy pointed out that the Institute for Fiscal Studies says that Labour would not need to cut further after 2016. Now, the Labour leadership in London has studiously avoided endorsing this idea. But Miliband and Ed Balls can

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

The Tory ‘rally’ that wasn’t: these photos reveal how modern campaigning works

David Cameron took the stage at an election rally in Wadebridge, Cornwall this evening. He was surrounded by supporters waving placards. From the pictures, it seems there was a real sense of excitement about the Conservative party. But here are a couple of photos taken from a perspective that’s a bit, er, different. The PM is currently holding a rally in Cornwall, in what appears to be a massive cow shed pic.twitter.com/eJh6RrnsQ6 — Niall Paterson (@skynewsniall) April 7, 2015 To give you a better idea of the size of this barn, and the size of the rally, the event is entirely behind this bus pic.twitter.com/4SPBJ8B1X7 — Niall Paterson (@skynewsniall) April

Peter Robins

Where did Ed Miliband get ‘Happy Warrior’ from? (Clue: not Wordsworth)

William Wordsworth, sad to say, may not after all have a significant role in the 2015 election campaign. His name was taken in vain repeatedly this weekend, after someone passed the Sun Ed Miliband’s preparatory notes for the seven-way election debate. Prominent in these were the words ‘Happy Warrior’, which every news source gleefully traced back to Wordsworth’s 1806 poem Character of the Happy Warrior: Who is the happy Warrior? Who is he That every man in arms should wish to be? —It is the generous Spirit, who, when brought Among the tasks of real life, hath wrought Upon the plan that pleased his boyish thought: Whose high endeavours are

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

My night with Nicola Sturgeon

When I watch Nicola Sturgeon exercising her newfound charm and confidence, I experience a pang of intimate regret. Some 15 years ago — when she was a new MSP and the SNP’s shadow education minister — we both appeared on a late-night Scottish television show in Aberdeen, in which guests were invited to defend controversial propositions in front of a live audience of students. My task was to argue that poorer countries should not have their debts forgiven (then the theme of the Millennium ‘Jubilee’ movement, now a key argument about Greece) as a result of misplaced rich-world guilt; needless to say I took a pasting. The future first minister

Robert Smith

Ed Miliband’s popularity is improving – and the Tories should worry

Ed Miliband has long been considered the Conservatives’ main electoral asset. Certainly, Simon Danczuk touched a nerve when he described his party leader as a liability only a fortnight ago. But as the election nears, is the Labour leader beginning to turn his personal fortunes around? Polling from YouGov shows a fascinating trend. Voter approval of Miliband’s performance as Labour leader has improved from a dire state in late-November last year, at net -56%, to the most recent level of -26% last week. With the election campaign underway, a significant chunk of the electorate appear to have given the Labour leader a second look. Indeed, his net approval rating improved by

Tim Stanley

Rand Paul’s libertarian crusade will shake up the presidential race

Finally, the presidential race got interesting. The thought of Hillary Clinton vs Jeb Bush was too much of a rerun of the same old thing: big government liberal vs big government conservative arguing about how best to spend Americans’ money. And they both share a taste for military excursions – white boots marching in foreign lands. Well, now there’s a candidate officially in the race who stands for something completely different. Rand Paul’s libertarian crusade could be about the most exciting candidacy in my political lifetime. It won’t star the most exciting candidate. Senator Paul (Kentucky) wears the standard uniform of the college Republican: blue blazer, red tie, grey slacks. The

Sebastian Payne

Ukip may be slipping in the polls but it will still have a big impact on the election

Is the Ukip bandwagon slowing down? Today’s Sun reports that Ukip has lost a quarter of its voters since November, from an average of 16.75 per cent in polls last November to 12.25 per cent in March. As the chart below shows, Ukip’s share of the vote, according to YouGov, has been the slide since the heady days of the Rochester & Strood and Clacton by-elections: [datawrapper chart=”http://static.spectator.co.uk/dEo2g/index.html”] Nigel Farage has even admitted that the march of the people’s army has stalled. But when asked by the Telegraph this afternoon if he was ‘panicking’, he responded ‘good Lord, no!’, claiming the Sun’s figures are a little out: ‘Well – firstly their poll of polls is wrong – the

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Is the general election campaign like watching paint dry?

It is rather fashionable at the moment for those involved in politics to moan about what a boring election campaign this is shaping up to be, and how the only excitement will be once polls close and the results start rolling in. But interestingly fewer voters than you might think agree with this view. YouGov asked at the weekend ‘how interesting or boring have you found the general election campaign so far?’, and while a majority – 51 per cent – said it was boring, 42 per cent said it was interesting. The ‘interesting’ camp was made up of 33 per cent of voters who thought the campaign ‘fairly interesting’, while

Steerpike Steerpike

Coffee Shots: Puppy love for Yvette Cooper and Will Straw

Could this photo beat Nick Clegg’s hedgehog photo call to be the strangest animal election campaign snap? Here Yvette Cooper and Labour’s candidate for Rossendale and Darwen Will Straw are posing on a pavement with a slightly flattened-looking dog under their hands. Handily, in the background, a girl carries a spare dog past, just in case the first one does manage to escape. Thx to @YvetteCooperMP for joining us in Whitworth to talk about risks of Tory police cuts & meet our local mascot pic.twitter.com/xMGFCJ1Brk — Will Straw (@wdjstraw) April 7, 2015

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

How Labour can use Europe to stop the Tories

One of the first tasks of a party in our time of fragmented politics is to stop their opponents making alliances. As things stand, the Tories can form a coalition with Ukip (and it tells you all you need to know about David Cameron that he would even consider such a possibility) the Democratic Unionists and the Liberal Democrats. As the Lib Dems are likely to form the largest block, they are the most important target for Labour. You only have to listen to Nick Clegg, say, or Danny Alexander, to suspect that they would rather keep the coalition with Cameron. Why shouldn’t they? They’ve worked together for five years.

Steerpike Steerpike

Journalists jeered for asking Tony Blair questions at Labour press conference

Labour have continued their bizarre war on the media with aplomb. As Mr S has reported in the past, pesky journalists that have the audacity to ask awkward questions are given the full hairdryer treatment from the audience at Labour’s set piece events. Today’s speech by Tony Blair was no different: This Tony Blair event very nostalgic. A member of the audience even called me “Tory scum” for asking a question. — James Landale (@BBCJLandale) April 7, 2015 Modern trait of crowd booing journalists who ask the most relevant questions. Expect more of it to come. #Blair — Chris Gibson (@ChrisGibsonNews) April 7, 2015 All stirred up by the party’s

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

George Osborne’s press conference leaves questions unanswered

This is supposed to be the week when people start thinking about the General Election. George Osborne certainly thinks voters are only just switching on as he used his press conference this morning to reiterate a number of claims about Labour’s economic policies that the Tories made last week, including one that the Institute for Fiscal Studies politely described as ‘unhelpful’. The Chancellor launched something called ‘Labour Party Fiscal Plans: An Analysis’, which he presented with the help of a nifty PowerPoint that splashed the words ‘SPENT’ over every funding stream Ed Miliband’s party has come up with so far. It included the claim that Labour would hit working families

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The Scottish TV debates offer Labour one final chance to hold back the SNP advance

Tonight’s Scottish leaders’ debate in Edinburgh is as important to the general election campaign as last week’s debate featuring Cameron, Miliband et al in Manchester. Both this debate and the second Scottish one tomorrow offer Labour a final opportunity to reverse the SNP advance. The polls indicate that the SNP are on course to take 28 Scottish seats off Labour in May. This would make it the largest Scottish party at Westminster. It would also make it impossible for Ed Miliband to win a majority. At the moment, nothing seems capable of halting the Nationalists’ momentum. The dramatic fall in the oil price, which has upset many of the calculations in the independence white paper,

Steerpike Steerpike

Revealed: Desperate Clegg takes £50,000 in last-minute donations in fight to keep his seat

According to a recent Ashcroft poll, Nick Clegg is on course to lose his seat in the general election. If he is ousted from Sheffield Hallam, the Deputy Prime Minister will follow in the footsteps of the Liberal leaders Archibald Sinclair and Herbert Samuel, who both lost their seats while leading the party. Clegg is of course keen to make sure history doesn’t repeat itself. So keen in fact, that Steerpike can now reveal the desperate lengths the Liberal Democrats leader has gone to in his fight to keep Labour from taking his seat. According to the latest register of interests, Clegg has taken a total of £50,000 in donations since mid-March. In his hour of need, Clegg

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Is ‘come home’ the best thing David Cameron can say to Ukip voters? 

One of the things the Tories need to do in order to hold on to power is to convince those considering voting Ukip in the General Election that it is safer to back the Tories instead. To that end, David Cameron yesterday told a campaign event that he hoped such voters would return to the Tories so that Labour wouldn’t have a chance of putting the recovery at risk. He said: ‘Come with us, come back home to us rather than risk all of this good work being undone by Labour.’ Labour said this was further evidence that the Tories and Ukip were preparing to work together. But Ukip’s response

Sebastian Payne

Campaign kick-off: 30 days to go

With the Easter break now over, the general election campaign will notch up a gear today as the political parties try to make the most of the last month of campaigning. To help guide you through the melée of stories and spin, we’ll be posting a summary every morning of the main events so you know what to expect from the day ahead. 1. Blair’s back — again After a series of cryptic interviews in which he appeared to complain about the direction of the Labour Party, Tony Blair has gone loyal for the campaign. The Guardian reports that the former Prime Minister will be speaking in his old Sedgefield constituency