Politics

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

Tuesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Relax, you can safely ignore BP’s “warnings” about the impact of Scottish independence

Why, a Tory grandee asked me recently, won’t more businesses come out against Scottish independence? It was, in his view, axiomatic that independence would be bad for businesses north and south of the border. So why the silence? Perhaps, or at least in part perhaps, because when businesses do raise their concerns they often contrive to present themselves as hopeless chumps. I am sure Bob Dudley, chief of BP, is personally committed to Britain but the idea, as expressed in an interview with the BBC, that Scottish independence creates “big uncertainties” for his business is poppycock. Well, a kind of poppycock anyway. It would require BP to operate in another country and I can

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Labour’s NEC backs ‘historic’ union link reforms

The Labour party’s National Executive Committee has backed Ed Miliband’s plans to change the party’s trade union links by 28 votes to two, which marks a resounding victory for the Labour leader. There was little doubt that the NEC would endorse the reforms, which will still take five years to be implemented, and in the end the two members who opposed the proposals (another member abstained) were vocal leftwing backbencher Dennis Skinner and Christine Shawcroft. The next step is for the party to vote on the reforms at a special conference on 1 March. Miliband said this afternoon: ‘Some people will find change difficult to accept. Others are worried about

Ed West Ed West

Could we move all politicians to Manchester?

The Ukip candidate for Wythenshawe and Sale East has come up with a rather interesting idea: he wants to move the Department for Culture, Media and Sport to Manchester, bringing 700 jobs to the city. I imagine that a lot of Ukip supporters would be quite happy to see the department metaphorically sent to Zurich for an appointment with Dignitas, but it’s a valid point. Why shouldn’t we send more civil servants out of London, where the cost of office space and decent housing is much lower, compared to the capital with its chronic shortage of affordable homes. Lots of countries have separate political and financial centres; Italy has Rome/Milan,

Steerpike Steerpike

Where’s Wally?

There were lots of sniggers at the back when Ed Miliband failed to make the list of the Most Connected Men in Britain, drawn up by Editorial Intelligence for GQ. Plenty of Labour stooges did make the list, so we can reject claims of bias. Ed’s grumpy spinmeister Tom Baldwin is on it, as is Shadow Education Secretary the Hon. Tristram Hunt. Even David Miliband, who has left these shores, made the cut. Now, call Mr S an old cynic but it seems that more column inches have been devoted to Ed not being on this list, than would ever be given over had he scraped on. If only Labour were

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Ukip’s anti-Labour mission

Ukip wants to use the Wythenshawe and Sale East by-election as a way of spooking Labour into realising that it can steal votes from every party, not just the Tories. Labour is sufficiently worried to be trialling special anti-Ukip leaflets in the constituency, but behind-the-scenes senior figures still seem reasonably relaxed about the real threat that Nigel Farage’s party poses. The picture (from Guido) above, though, shows that Ukip is trying to hit the two weak spots for Labour, the ones it is trying to neutralise rather than develop radical policy on: welfare and immigration. That line ‘protect your jobs and benefits’ seems to be referring to ‘benefit tourism’, but perhaps

Monday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Blow for Yeo as local Tory party says ‘go’

In part two of the Constituent Spring, Tim Yeo’s constituency association has just voted not to re-adopt him as their Conservative candidate. The Tory MP had appealed against the decision of the South Suffolk Conservative Association’s decision to deselect him, and the result of the vote on this was announced today. Yeo said: ‘It has been a privilege to serve as MP for South Suffolk since 1983. I will continue to work for all my constituents until the General Election next year. I am immensely grateful to all those Conservative Party members who voted for me to continue as their MP. I now ask them all to campaign for my successor

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Michael Gove and the fight for the moral high ground

Michael Gove’s speech today was, as James explained at the weekend, a pitch from the Tories to be the optimists of the 2015 election. He wanted to have a little boast about the success of the government’s education reforms in raising the desirability of a state education. He said: ‘When Channel Four make documentaries about great comprehensives – academies – in Essex and Yorkshire, when BBC3 make heroes out of tough young teachers, when even Tatler publishes a guide to the best state schools – you know tectonic plates have started to shift.’ This is hardly the running down of teachers or state schools that Gove’s critics like to complain

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Tory modernisers make hard-headed pitch for greenery

The 2020 group of modernising, mostly 2010-intake, Conservatives is trying to muscle in on their party’s manifesto-writing process by producing an impressive number of reports that they hope the Tory brains trust writing the 2015 offer will hoover up. The latest, ‘Sweating our assets’: productivity and efficiency across the UK economy was led by Laura Sandys, with David Ruffley, Baroness Wheatcroft, Nicola Blackwood and Steven Barclay all contributing. It has some eye-catching proposals, such as a ban on certain products such as mobile phones going to landfill. But what is more interesting about this report is the way it is trying to frame a favourite argument of the modernisers. When

Steerpike Steerpike

Tories and Labour both losing 8% of their female MPs

Another day, another female MP decides to quit politics. Ann Clwyd has announced that, after 30 years in the Commons, she will not be standing in 2015. Female MPs have been in the news of late – either because they are retiring or fighting de-selection. On yesterday’s edition of the Andrew Marr Show, Harriet Harman said: ‘My concern is that we’re having a sort of cull of senior, authoritative women and they’re all being replaced by men’. She then went on to use this as evidence that the Tories have a ‘women problem’. The numbers, though, tell a slightly different story. There were 48 female Tory MPs in 2010. Lorraine

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Why Ed Balls doesn’t care about criticisms of his tax plan

There were a million people who voted Labour in the 2005 general election but not in 2010, when the party fell from a 66 majority to 48 seats behind the Tories. Thanks to the Lib Dems’ spiteful rejection of boundary changes that would have helped their coalition partners, the 2015 poll is already rigged in Labour’s favour by about 30 seats, so the number of floaters who have to be won over to give Miliband and Balls a working majority is likely to be well down in six digits rather than seven. No doubt Labour’s pollsters know how many to the nearest thousand, and have them segmented and profiled to

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Gove row paints dispiriting picture of a post-2015 Lib-Con coalition

The row between the Lib Dems and Conservatives over Ofsted has taken a curious turn this morning, with Lib Dem MP David Ward, not particularly well-liked by the leadership, appearing as a party spokesman on the Today programme. Given this is about someone’s fixed-term contract not being renewed (any voters who are bothering to pay attention to this row will wish a similar fuss was made when the same thing happened to them), it is, as Fraser said on Saturday, an entirely manufactured row designed to appeal to that very specific group of voters Nick Clegg is trying to court. But this row does raise an interesting question about the

Sunday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

What the LibDems are up to

David Laws’ attack on his former BFF Michael Gove is leading the news bulletins today, and rightly. Its wider significance lies in that the Liberal Democrats have decided it’s time to start picking fights not just with Tories in general but Michael Gove in particular. So Gove, having offered all that hospitality to David Laws, finds the guy he thought was his clansman wield the dagger on the instructions of his commander. This isn’t quite Westmister’s equivalent of the Glencoe Massacre, but the dynamics of the coalition have changed – in precisely the way that James Forsyth outlines in his political column this week. The LibDems’ support halved soon after

Saturday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Sally Morgan is wrong: quangos are not stuffed with Tories

Sally Morgan’s claim this morning that No10 is trying to purge non-Tories from quangos doesn’t ring true to me. Last time I checked, Team Cameron was still putting Labour types into quangos, oblivious to the game that Labour has been playing so long for so well. Exhibit A is the egregious Chris Smith, a former Labour Culture Secretary who has somehow ended up chairing the Environment Agency (whose incompetence can now be seen covering 23,000 acres of the in Somerset Levels). In the Labour years, the Labour Party was very good at deploying its own people to charities and quangos – making a good government-in-exile to attack a Tory government for

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Tory MPs express concern about ‘stateless’ plan for terror suspects

Concern is growing across the House of Commons about Theresa May’s last-minute amendment to the Immigration Bill rendering foreign-born terror suspects ‘stateless’. Today on Radio 4’s the Week in Westminster, I interviewed Laura Sandys and Mark Reckless, two Tory MPs who occupy rather different ends of the Conservative spectrum. But both expressed discomfort with this proposal, and were clear they’d voted for it because they’d been promised a briefing afterwards. This is what Sandys said: ‘I supported it after I was assured that we would have a proper debrief and discuss it after it had gone through the House of Lords, and I am quite concerned about it, I don’t

James Forsyth James Forsyth

It’s cohabitation, not coalition now

The Tories and the Liberal Democrats are increasingly going their separate ways. But they’ll stay in government together until the election is called. As one Whitehall Lib Dem told me recently, ‘We’re not in a coalition now. We’re just cohabiting’ During the immigration bill, it was striking how Tory Ministers abstained on the Raab amendment while Lib Dem ministers voted against. Indeed, if there had been more votes, there would have been more coalition splits for the government had agreed to suspend ‘collective responsibility’ on various amendments. Oddly enough, though, this distancing is one of the reasons why the coalition looks likely to go the distance. In this week’s magazine,

Friday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Thirsk and Malton Tories boot out Anne McIntosh

So the Constituent Spring continues. Thirsk and Malton Conservatives have just announced that they have voted to not re-adopt their MP Anne McIntosh. The party has announced that selection for a candidate will open shortly, but McIntosh has vowed to fight on. She said: ‘I’d like to thank all those who supported me throughout, from both Vale of York and Thirsk and Malton. ‘It is my intention to stand for Thirsk, Malton and Filey constituency at the next General Election. ‘Meanwhile I remain committed to the Conservative Party locally and nationally and shall continue with my constituency and parliamentary duties with my customary passion. ‘In the coming year I will

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Cameron needs to ensure Eurosceptic ire is directed at Labour, the Lib Dems and the Lords – not at him

The EU referendum bill has just been knocked on the head in the House of Lords. The peers, led by Labour and Liberal Democrat Lords, have denied the bill the time it needs to get through. So the appointed house has defied the elected house and denied the public a say on a matter of fundamental constitutional importance. This poses a problem for David Cameron. The bill was meant to be one of the ways that the Tories would try and halt Ukip’s advance ahead of the European Elections. The last thing Cameron wants is the Tory party getting in a bate about Europe and complaining that this should have

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Serious concerns about plans to render terror suspects ‘stateless’

The row over the Immigration Bill is by no means over. It will go to the Lords next, where peers will doubtless have a few things to say about certain aspects of it. Theresa May is still in a hurry to get it through Parliament, so there will likely be some interesting tricks from the government side to try to speed things up. But Conservative MPs are also very concerned about something they backed last night which gained far less attention. The Home Secretary rushed out an amendment on Wednesday night which would render ‘stateless’ foreign-born terror suspects. The details are actually rather alarming: someone who had already naturalised in