Politics Archives

Sunday

2 Mar 2014

Does Tristram Hunt think that choice in education should be only for the rich?

At last – Labour has made its intentions over education clear. Throughout his interview on the Sunday Politics today, Tristram Hunt showed that Labour has switched allegiances to adults, not the pupils. On the side of institutions, not those who use them. Although the shadow education secretary stated he ‘doesn’t want to waste political energy on undoing reforms that, in certain situations, build rather successfully on Labour party policy’, he confirmed his party would not sanction any more free schools: ‘I was in Stroud on Thursday and plans there for a big new style of school in an area where you’ve got surplus places threatened to destroy the viability of

Saturday

1 Mar 2014

Mathieu Vaillancourt

The Tories should look to Canada for victory

Is it really possible for the Tories to win a majority in 2015 after five years in government? Perhaps they need to look at the Conservatives in Canada, who won their majority in the 2011 elections after two elections where they won a minority government. But the way the party won this majority was partly down to its active courting of the New Canadians – new migrants to the country from al over the world. Canada’s largest city, Toronto is probably the most diverse in the world, with half of its population from ‘visible minorities’. New Canadians tended to be supporters of the centre-left Liberal Party until a few years

Isabel Hardman

Conservative ministers link Russian aggression to Miliband’s Syria stance

Sajid Javid isn’t the only observer of Russia’s behaviour over the situation in Ukraine to link Vladimir Putin’s aggression to the situation in Syria. Perhaps the West’s decision not to intervene in that conflict has given Putin the sense that he can do what he wants without any response from other countries. But Javid’s suggestion in a tweet this afternoon that there is a ‘direct link between Miliband’s cynical vote against Syria motion and Russia’s actions on Ukraine. Completely unfit to lead Britain’ goes rather further than that. It also doesn’t fit particularly comfortably with the fact that 30 of Javid’s own Conservative colleagues rebelled on that motion and many

The Spectator

William Hague summons Russian ambassador as Russian parliament approves sending troops to Ukraine

William Hague, the Foreign Secretary who is off to Kiev tomorrow, has issued the following statement:- ‘I am deeply concerned at the escalation of tensions in Ukraine, and the decision of the Russian parliament to authorise military action on Ukrainian soil against the wishes of the Ukrainian Government. This action is a potentially grave threat to the sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of Ukraine. We condemn any act of aggression against Ukraine. ‘I spoke today to Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov to urge steps to calm this dangerous situation. I told Minister Lavrov that Britain supports the Ukrainian Government’s request for urgent consultations in accordance with the 1994 Budapest Memorandum signed

James Forsyth

Putin asks the Russian parliament to approve sending troops to Ukraine

Vladimir Putin’s decision to ask the Russian parliament to approve the deployment of Russian troops to Ukraine makes the situation there even more serious. The request shows that Putin has no intention of heeding Western warning to request the sovereignty of Ukraine. It is also noticeable that the request doesn’t simply cover the Crimea, with its ethnic Russian population, but the whole of Ukraine. It now seems that at the very least this situation will lead towards the de-facto partition of the Ukraine. But the question is whether Putin will be satisfied with this. His ambition has always been to restore Russia’s pride about its place in the world, ‘defeating’

Isabel Hardman

Labour kindly highlights Waitrose’s free coffee scheme

At least when the Conservatives blathered on about chocolate oranges, they had the excuse that Britain was feeling pretty good about itself. Today, the party that brought you the cost-of-gymming crisis has taken up a new campaign which just shows how noble and powerful opposition can be. It’s already being branded Labour’s CostaCoffeeCrisis, but it involves an attack on Waitrose for the heinous crime of offering its customers free coffee. The FT’s Jim Pickard has the story that Labour shadow communities minister Andy Sawford has written to every MP with a local Waitrose asking them to campaign against the offer (which is available through the myWaitrose loyalty scheme, something many

Friday

28 Feb 2014

Isabel Hardman

Nigel Farage: We can win the European elections

Nigel Farage likes to argue he’s not a normal politician. He says what he thinks and what other people think too. He certainly didn’t do what other politicians are trying to do ahead of the European elections, which is expectation management. Instead, he set the bar pretty darn high for Ukip, telling his party’s spring conference in Torquay that ‘we can cause an earthquake on May 22nd by winning the European elections’, adding ‘if we top those polls, it will then give us the momentum to drive us forward to the general election a year after that’. He has set Ukip a big challenge there because if the party doesn’t

Hamish Macdonell

How Osborne’s tactics drew Standard Life into the independence debate

In politics, as in comedy, timing is everything. It is worth bearing this in mind when considering George Osborne’s ‘you can’t keep the pound’ speech and what has happened since. There were many (including some senior Lib Dems) who were quick to criticise the Chancellor after he ruled out a shared Sterling zone with a independent Scotland earlier this month. Alistair Carmichael, the Scottish Secretary, even went public to suggest it may well have been ‘wrong from a tactical point of view’ to goad the Nats in this way, particularly as the Yes camp received a noticeable surge in support as a result. But it now appears as if there was a

Isabel Hardman

Is Labour aiming for victory, or just the largest party, in 2015?

You won’t catch Ed Miliband or David Cameron admitting that their best hope of governing after 2015 is in a coalition or a minority government. But what if their party machines have already decided that this is what’s going to happen anyway? There are secret discussions within the Labour party about scaling back the number of ‘target seats’ (the seats that it will pour the most resources into in order to win – full list here) from the official list of 106 to 80, or even just 60, which means that some in Labour think it is better to aim to be the largest party rather than out-and-out victory. I

Igor Toronyi-Lalic

Spike Lee’s love letter to Ukip

Tell me: does this passage from American director Spike Lee’s recent rant against the gentrification of Brooklyn not sound like a press release from UKIP? ‘I’m for democracy and letting everybody live but you gotta have some respect. You can’t just come in when people have a culture that’s been laid down for generations and you come in and now shit gotta change because you’re here? Get the fuck outta here.’ Admittedly it’s a little street for Nigel Farage. But reread it with a Bucks bray and it’s pretty bang on; the voice of Little England undeniably rings out. In fact, if anything, it’s the kind of thing that New

Stephen Booth

Merkel visit: now it’s time for David Cameron to tell us want he wants

David Cameron pulled out all the ceremonial stops for Chancellor Angela Merkel’s visit to London and the way in which she played along is testament to her desire for the UK to remain within the EU. The lengthy passage of her speech dedicated to British sacrifices during both world wars was a polished diplomatic gesture that played well with Britain’s ideas about itself and its own historical role in Europe. It was a gesture that she did not have to make. However, as she said herself, Merkel’s address could never live up to the hype. This speech was never going to give us all of the answers to the EU’s

Thursday

27 Feb 2014

Rod Liddle

If Ukraine’s protests were a revolution, why wasn’t the Stop the War march?

It’s ages since I last went on a decent demo and had a bit of a dust-up with the pigs. I should get out more, there’s a lot of fun to be had, throwing stuff at the police and shouting things in a self-righteous manner. I think the last one I attended was in the very early 1980s, in Cardiff. Sinn Fein was marching through the centre of the city in support of its right to maim and murder people, and the National Front decided to march against them. As a consequence, the Socialist Workers Party’s most successful front organisation, the Anti-Nazi League, insisted that it had a right to

James Forsyth

Welcome to the age of four-party politics

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_27_February_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman on why the two party political system is dying” startat=1207] Listen [/audioplayer]Two things will make the next general election campaign quite unlike any previous election in this country. The first is that we now have four-party politics right across Britain. In Scotland and Wales, the nationalist parties have been a political force for a generation. But the big change is in England, where Ukip is emerging as a fourth force. Second, the campaign will be haunted by the spectre of another hung parliament. The question of what happens if no party wins an overall majority will be asked time and time again by

Iain Martin

Back to school with Lord Baker

Ben, an articulate 14-year-old hard at work in the school design and proto-typing centre, is explaining to Lord Baker of Dorking how 3D printing works. Baker, a former Tory education secretary, listens intently before declaring the technology ‘marvellous’. This coming July will mark the 25th anniversary of his leaving the Department for Education — but Lord Baker, who turns 80 this year, has never quite stopped the school reform that he started. We’re at the University Technical College (UTC) in Sheffield, one of 17 such schools which has opened in recent years following the decision by Baker and his late friend Ron Dearing, the former Post Office boss, to make the

Fraser Nelson

Why David Cameron’s ‘Northern Alliance’ may reshape Europe

If David Cameron were to divide Europe up, he’d make some crude distinctions. There would be the basket cases, like Italy, Spain, Greece, France — examples, by and large, of how countries should not be run. Then there’d be the former Soviet bloc, sceptical about Brussels because they recently escaped a remote, controlling bureaucracy and don’t want to repeat the experience. Then come the good guys, the people with whom he intends to reshape the continent: the Germans, the Dutch and the Scandis. This is the group that the Prime Minister has started referring to as his ‘Northern Alliance’. Mr Cameron has, until now, had little interest in the machinations of

Isabel Hardman

Net migration wobble caused by rising EU immigration

How fitting that on the day Angela Merkel pops in to London to natter about EU reform, new figures show a big increase in net migration driven by a rise in immigration from within the European Union to the UK. Net migration in the year to September 2013 rose from 154,000 the previous year to 212,000. This morning, the Prime Minister’s official spokesman said that it was ‘absolutely the objective’ to reduce net migration to below 100,000 by 2015. But today’s figures are a blow to the government’s chances of doing that. The problem is that while the Home Office is doing its best to control what it can control

Ed West

Net migration is up, but net migration is a meaningless term

The latest figures showing a big increase in net migration are a blow to the Conservatives, although it obviously reflects on the relative strength of the British economy; at least in relation to the basket cases of southern Europe, from where large numbers have come. It will almost certainly mean more Tory voters joining Nigel Farage’s purple revolution, especially because it illustrates the impossibility of controlling immigration while Britain is inside the EU; the number of EU citizens arriving went up from 149,000 to 209,000 in a year. But that’s part of the curious 80/20 Rule about the immigration debate; Europeans accounted for only a fifth of migration under New

Ed West

Vladimir Putin is a reactionary autocrat, not a conservative

Apparently the new Muppets film features Russians as the baddies, a sign of the times as we increasingly draw into a new ideological cold war with the old enemy. Or perhaps a hot, ethnic war, if events in Crimea get any worse, events which raise questions about western foreign policy. Why are we getting involved in this country ‘steeped in blood and carpeted with unquiet graves’, as Peter Hitchens calls it? Another paleocon type, the Telegraph’s semi-deprogrammed former leftist Tim Stanley, says that by provoking Russia into a direct confrontation we look foolish and weak. The ideological cold war was the subject of last week’s cover story, in which Owen

James Forsyth

Merkel makes it clear: no special status for Britain in the EU

Angela Merkel’s speech today didn’t close doors on EU reform but nor did it open as many as some close to Cameron had hoped that it would. As the German Chancellor made clear at the start of her speech, she didn’t want to say either that Britain could have what it wanted from the renegotiation or that Britain could have nothing. listen to ‘Angela Merkel: ‘We need to reform the political shape of Europe’’ on Audioboo The German Chancellor talked of the need for a more competitive EU, suggested that she might be open to some changes on freedom of movement and offered the vaguest hint of possible treaty change.

Steerpike

Coffee Shots: Ever closer union?

Things certainly seemed cosy between Angela Merkel and her favourite ‘naughty nephew’ when David Cameron greeted the German Chancellor in Downing Street earlier. So what on earth was said between that greeting and this sofa moment? I’m happy to welcome Angela Merkel to my Downing St flat, after her excellent address to Parliament. pic.twitter.com/0LoSuIKI0A — David Cameron (@David_Cameron) February 27, 2014