Politics

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_23_Oct_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”James Forsyth, Mats Persson and Matthew Elliott discuss Europe” startat=60] Listen [/audioplayer]It is easy to mock David Cameron on immigration. Under pressure from the public and from Ukip, he’s having to hot-foot it to a tougher position on the free movement of labour within the European Union. Ideas dismissed as unworkable only a few months ago are now on the table. But it’s not all political positioning. There really is a serious case for Britain to be treated differently from eurozone countries when it comes to freedom of movement. Whoever ends up in government after the next election, Britain’s relationship with the EU is going to have to

Tonight, we have a second poll from Rochester & Strood and it again shows Ukip ahead. Mark Reckless doesn’t lead by Clacton margins—Ukip are on 43 and the Tories 30 in this ComRes poll—but his advantage is formidable with just four weeks to go. Particularly alarming for the Tories is how many voters there intend to use this by-election to kick the government. 62 percent of those polled agree with the statement that, ‘“This by-election is a good opportunity for me to show David Cameron and the Conservative Party how unhappy I am with their government”   Having already announced that Cameron—and every other Tory member of the Cabinet—will visit

Last week’s market tremor, provoked by renewed fears of eurozone stagnation and a slowdown in global growth, was serious enough for IMF chief Christine Lagarde to feel the need to pronounce, in her most soothing tone, that it was ‘maybe at this stage an over-reaction’. But if you were listening to the Today programme on Saturday morning, you might have thought it was all a bit of a joke — and one that served irresponsible investors right. In the absence of economics editor Robert Peston and his almost invisible successor as business editor, Kamal Ahmed, John Humphrys conducted a notably flippant interview with ‘one of the world’s most influential investors’,

What a godsend to Ukip José Manuel Barroso must be.  On his recent short visit to the UK he not only managed to tell the British public that limits to immigration (desired by the overwhelming majority of the British public) would be ‘illegal’.  He also managed to tell us that if we left the EU, Britain would have ‘zero’ influence in the world. I do wonder who bureaucrats like Mr Barroso think they are going to persuade.  Are they simply relying on swaying or scaring us on the presumption that we have no historical knowledge or memory?  Because this latest message can’t possibly work, can it?  Most British people don’t

The British recruits who have joined Isis are not exceptions. They flourish in a culture in which it is so commonplace to offer support to authoritarian regimes and movements that few bother to condemn it. Free speech ought to mean the freedom to challenge and criticise in all except the most tightly defined circumstances. Instead in Britain tolerance has become indifference; a lazy desire to live in our comfortable bubbles. The dominant culture views vigorous criticism as rude or insensitive – or, to use that popular and completely meaningless school-prefect putdown, “inappropriate.” More often that not, criticism is taken down and used as evidence of the critic’s failings, his or her

In a 1978 interview to mark her third year as leader of the Conservative Party, Margaret Thatcher addressed public concerns with immigration, stating that ‘people are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped’. Goodness knows what word she would use to describe the situation we face today. Anyone who has knocked on doors or surveyed their constituents in recent years will tell you the public have had enough. Immigration into the UK is the number one concern to the British public and, in my judgment, a party that does not address it will not win. In 2003 427,000 people arrived in Britain. In the years that followed