Politics

David Cameron was in feisty form on the Andrew Marr Show  this morning. Cameron, who has finally woken up to the need to be more political, defended his record — including his decision to cut the top rate of tax — with vigour. Cameron stressed how the richest 10 per cent are paying 10 times more towards the cost of deficit reduction than the bottom 10 per cent. But he argued, correctly, that the 50p tax rate was dangerously uncompetitive. He said that he was determined ‘to always be fair and seen to be fair’ which suggests to me that some new tax on the rich, something the Liberal Democrats

Too often the debate about the future direction of the Tory party is polarised between those who want to ‘modernise’ and those who want to ‘go right’. But there’s another problem, these labels now obscure as much as they reveal. In the next few days in Birmingham, the Tories have two important tasks: to show that they understand the squeeze on people’s living standards and are doing something about it and that they have a proper growth strategy. Some Cameron aides have long argued that the Prime Minister with his personal wealth can’t talk about the cost of living. But as Mitt Romney, a far less able political communicator than

Things have come to a pretty pass when the Labour Party is launching a campaign with a deficit clock to expose George Osborne’s shortcomings. But they are about to do today, I understand, highlighting how much extra the government is borrowing over the four days of the Tory conference compared to last year: £277 million, they say. I’ll post the link when it becomes live. Significantly, Labour is shifting from being in a position of deficit denial towards a position where they will (I suspect) sign up to Osborne’s spending plans. As Balls has found out, Osborne’s game is to dress up only-slightly-modified Labour spending plans with Tory language. But

This post s out-sourced to the almost-always-brilliant Hopi Sen who, despite being an incorrigible Labourite, has written a speech for David Cameron to deliver at next week’s Tory conference that is almost certainly better than the speech the Prime Minister will actually give. Among the many choice cuts: Mr Miliband spoke of Disraeli’s speech in Manchester. He spoke about it. I read it. I understood then why he was inspired. It must have sounded oddly familiar to him. Here is Disraeli on a dying radical government: “Extravagance was being substituted for energy… The unnatural stimulus was subsiding. Their paroxysms ended in prostration. Some took refuge in melancholy… their eminent chief

It doesn’t seem entirely fair that Stephen Twigg’s speech has been left to the final day of the Labour conference, when many have packed up and left Manchester already. But today Labour’s Shadow Education Secretary is to announce more reforms to education as part of the party’s new One Nation project. The idea is to make teaching an ‘elite profession for top graduates’, and Twigg plans to achieve that by offering incentives for high-flyers to work in tough schools such as paying off some of their student debt, funding for teachers to do master’s degrees and a National College for Teaching Excellence to develop new teaching standards. The centrepiece of