Politics

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

Tuesday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Miliband’s speech showed he couldn’t care less about leading ‘one nation’

I think I’m about the only journalist to have watched Ed Miliband’s speech and think it wasn’t awful. Here in Manchester, the consensus seems to be that this was as bad as a speech could be. And, admittedly, even I was tweeting rude things about it all of the way through (since when does anyone need a 10-year plan? Britain won a world war in six years). You may not like the politics but his speech was intellectually coherent, even pugnacious in parts. Sure, it was about an hour too long and had some worrying lacunas. His decision not to mention the economy was wise because he has nothing to say. There was no

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Exclusive: Michael Fallon says UK should reconsider military action in Syria to combat ISIS

The Ministry of Defence is like a sauna on Sunday. The air circulation system has been switched off and the place is hot—and deserted. Yet when you reach the Secretary of State’s floor, a small team is hard at work. As you enter Michael Fallon’s office, you see the reason why. On an easel sits a map of Iraq and Syria. Tellingly, though, this isn’t the only map on the stand. Sitting behind it are ones of Pakistan, the Central African Republic and Sierra Leone. It becomes clear as the interview goes on that the one of Ukraine has gone missing. Fallon is 62, but he has the energy of a man half his age.

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Miliband’s dividing lines

The more we learn about Ed Miliband’s speech (to be given later this afternoon), the clearer the dividing lines that it is drawing are. The word is that Miliband will announce more money for the NHS paid for by a combination of taxes on mansions, hedge funds and big tobacco. The message: Labour stands up for the NHS while the Tories stand up for people who live in mansions, hedge funds and tobacco companies. This might be crude politics but it will, I suspect, be quite effective. It emphasises Labour’s biggest strength, that they are the party of the NHS and social solidarity, and highlights the Tories’ biggest weakness, the

Steerpike Steerpike

Justine Thornton becomes Justine Miliband for Labour campaign

Having spent four years sticking to a wave at the end of conference and the odd photograph together with her husband, Justine Thornton has burst onto centre stage at Labour’s conference. Mrs Miliband – and she uses her Miliband name today – has written to Labour activists pledging her commitment to getting her man into Downing Street: ‘Honestly, as a young lawyer who wanted to change the world, I never would have believed that I would become a politician’s wife. It’s not a role you apply for, nor one I’ve found easy to understand. Just after Ed won, I Googled a few terms to see if there were books I

Steerpike Steerpike

Shadow ministerial munchies

Fancy a cheeky chew on Chuka, a bite of Balls or a munch on Miliband? At last night’s Sky party at Labour conference, the Shadow Cabinet were out in force – on macaroons, presumably to help with the cost of pudding crisis for hardworking people. Those around Miliband often get sniped at for being weak, but these macaroons were crunchy and had plenty of bite. Bizarrely, Eric Pickles gatecrashed the party at one point, albeit in slightly less robust form than usual: The question is, who is the least tasty shadow minister? Mr Steerpike’s bakery source says it was the Shadow Business Secretary who ended up lingering longest on the

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Labour says it will consider British air strikes as recall of Parliament looms

What will happen now that the US has launched airstrikes against Isis in Syria? Even though there is no requirement for Parliament to be consulted, it is very difficult for the British government to join without some form of debate and vote in the House of Commons. And this means that a recall of Parliament before it is scheduled to sit on 13 October. The end of this week is most likely, but there remains a debate at the top of the Tory party as to whether David Cameron could win a vote supporting British action. This is surprising, given so many of those who opposed action against Assad last

Monday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

The simple and shocking secret to the working class vote

How does Labour win back the working class voters who’ve abandoned it? This question, part of the soul searching the party fell into when it lost the 2010 election, has gained even greater currency since the Scottish referendum. This evening Michael Dugher and John Denham had a stab at answering it at a conference fringe. And the answers were really quite unsettling. Denham told the fringe that ‘we’re talking to people who’ve come to the conclusion that governments are a bonus if they don’t make their lives worse’ and therefore just one policy wasn’t going to solve it. He said: ‘We have to get back into a relationship with people

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Why is Labour’s Shadow Cabinet saying so little?

Normally the default response in the Labour party to a rough couple of weeks is to blame the Shadow Cabinet. They’re not pulling together, they’re thinking about their own future leadership prospects rather than backing Ed Miliband and so on and so forth. But while the Shadow Cabinet is looking weak this week at their party conference, for once it is not their fault. They are standing under a banner that announces ‘Labour’s Plan for Britain’s Future’, but then say no more about that plan. They are all being sent naked into the conference hall. All they are being required to talk about is their values, and what they have

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Chuka Umunna: the last disciple of New Labour’s third way

Chuka Umunna is the last disciple of the third way standing. At a Times fringe earlier, he was full of praise for centre-left European reformers such as the Italian PM Matteo Renzi and French PM Manuel Valls. Indeed, when Umunna spoke approvingly of the battle that Valls is having with his own party one sensed that it was something that Umunna would like to do himself. Umunna sought to portray himself as the reasonable outsider. He said that the biggest challenge in politics was to make compromise fashionable again. He urged the Labour party to embrace entrepreneurs and his tone about business and technology was unremittingly hopeful. His desire to command as much political

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Why the Tories can’t really criticise Rachel Reeves on debt

Rachel Reeves’ interview on BBC Daily Politics may have been excruciating at times (below), but was it really the ‘car crash’ that the Tories are today claiming? Matthew Hancock is crowing that she pointed out the conditions necessary for reducing debt. She said:- ‘We are planning to get the national debt down, which means you have to be running a surplus to be able to do that. If you are going to have national debt falling you have to have a surplus overall… To get debt falling you have to have a surplus on overall spending.’  Whether wittingly or not, Reeves went further than Ed Balls. She said she wants a

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Len McCluskey: Ed Balls’s long speech was good in parts

One thing that made Ed Balls’ speech to conference look a little less impressive was the barnstormer of an address from Len McCluskey to the hall shortly before. Delegates loved it, and not just because the Unite leader was saying the sorts of things that they wanted to hear. He was also passionate and interesting. He deservedly received the first proper standing ovation of the week. So what did McCluskey think of the speech that followed from Ed Balls? I caught up with the union boss afterwards, and he managed some faint praise: ‘Well, I think it was a long speech, and it was a very embracing speech, and I

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

After a flat speech from Ed Balls, what is Labour conference holding its breath for?

One of the curious traditions of Labour conference is that directly after the Shadow Chancellor’s speech, hard copies of his wise words are sold outside the conference hall. Any fiscally responsible Labour types trying to make difficult decisions about how to spend their money might be best advised to keep their £1 in their pockets for the time being, though. Today was not Ed Balls’ finest hour. It can’t just be that many people at Labour are exhausted after the Scottish campaign to react to their Shadow Chancellor’s speech. The reaction of the conference hall was far too flat for the last conference economy speech before the general election. And

Steerpike Steerpike

Esther McVey dodges White Dee debate

Upon leaving the Celebrity Big Brother house, Benefits Street star and Spectator contributor White Dee – also known as Deirdre Kelly – threatened to give ‘David Cameron a run for his money,’ and she’s true to her word. Fresh from this year’s Channel Five finale, Dee is about to enter a different sort of mad house full of self-obsessed prima donnas: Tory Party conference. Tory MP Mark Hoban has been nominated to debate Dee, after Esther McVey – another former telly star – chickened out of the showdown organised by Policy Exchange. Unlike McVey to dodge an opportunity for publicity.

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Miliband aide: Labour has never addressed the way the economy works

What’s Ed Miliband’s vision for the economy? We’ll get the public version of that vision in a short while when Ed Balls gives his speech to the Labour conference, but last night one of Ed Miliband’s closest advisers gave us a more interesting glimpse of the underpinning of the Labour leader’s economic plan. Stewart Wood, a former aide to Gordon Brown and now a key member of Miliband’s team, gave a fringe interview to ResPublica’s Philip Blond. The two men nattered with glasses of wine in their hands (which were at one point topped up by a CCHQ suffer embedded behind enemy lines) about Wood’s values. One answer in particular,

Tom Gallagher

The Scottish Church showed little statesmanship or common sense during the referendum

A few hours after the final result of the Scottish referendum was announced, I visited the cemetery at Cille Bharra on the Outer Hebridean island of Barra. It’s the burial place of Sir Compton Mackenzie (1883-1972). I wondered what this versatile character, World War I British spymaster, novelist, and Catholic convert whom the students at Glasgow university elected as their rector in 1931, would have made of the result. He believed that the Catholic faith had greatly influenced the nations’s long-term personality and felt that its soul had shrivelled with the retreat of that faith to remote outposts such as Barra, where he had his home in the 1930s. An

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Ed Balls: English votes plan is ‘most un-prime ministerial’ thing Cameron has done

Ed Balls wanted to spend his Today programme interview talking about his plans to cut the deficit by limiting child benefit increases to 1 per cent and cutting ministerial pay by five per cent. But he had two big stories to overcome that people seem more interested in. One is his accidental wounding of a journalist, which has made front page news, and the other is English votes for English laws, which is the even bigger front page news from the Labour conference so far (and with a newsless day in the hall yesterday, who can blame journalists for going after something else?). He tried two tactics, which rather cancelled

Sunday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Where Labour and The Spectator agree on social mobility

The Labour Party conference has got off to a very promising start, with The Spectator being complimented from the stage and applauded in the hall. ‘Here’s a publication you don’t hear praised that often at a Labour Conference: the Spectator,’ started Gloria De Piero, its equalities spokeswoman. But she did not, alas, go to quote our editorial ‘The false promise of “equality.“’ She was instead praising our working with the Social Mobility Foundation for summer internships – something that a lot of publications do, including the New Statesman. Her speech is above. It’s good to see both left and right agreed in the need to address declining social mobility in Britain. The penetration of the

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Labour conference: The new politics, according to Hilary Benn

Judging by the reaction in the conference hall, Hilary Benn’s speech was the best of this afternoon’s session. Several people gave him a standing ovation. His task was rather easier than Ed Miliband’s on Marr this morning, because the Shadow Communities and Local Government Secretary could talk about hopey-changey Labour ideas, rather than the nopey-changey Labour opposition to English votes for English laws (EVEL). So Benn focused on the devolution to English cities and regions that Labour has been working on and talking about for months, arguing that it was the true way to respond to the referendum result. He said: ‘Our deal is for all parts of England. Conference,

Steerpike Steerpike

Coffee Shots: Ed Balls wounds journalist at bloody football match

Ed Balls playing football each year at Labour conference is almost as big as Ed Balls Day. The Shadow Chancellor always participates enthusiastically in the annual hacks vs MPs match. Sometimes, he’s a little too enthusiastic. Like today, when he accidentally wounded lobby journalist Rob Merrick. Still, the pair made up by the end of the match. Those who predict the General Election campaign will be a bloody battle were more correct than they could ever have imagined.