Politics Archives

Saturday

22 Sep 2012

Don’t expect Nick Clegg to throw too many rocks at the Tories in Brighton

The Lib Dem round of pre-conference interviews today shows where the party wants to look distinctive. It is tax ‘fairness’, greenery and social mobility on which it has decided to set its stall. One thing worth noting, though, is that Nick Clegg’s interview in The Independent does not rule out future welfare cuts. He tells Andy Grice that ‘We are not going to do an across-the-board, two-year freeze of all benefits during this parliament’. This leaves the Liberal Democrats plenty of room for manoeuvre ahead of the autumn statement on December 5th. I expect that we won’t hear too much bashing of his coalition partners from the deputy Prime Minister

Isabel Hardman

David Laws to announce increase in pupil premium

The first minister up on the stage at the Liberal Democrat conference this afternoon is new education minister David Laws. He has an announcement which will please those in the audience: the party’s flagship pupil premium will increase from £600 to £900 per child. This is what he is expected to say: ‘I can announce today that next year the Pupil Premium will increase again. It will rise from £600 to £900 per child. Last year it paid for over 1.8 million pupils. Just think what we have done with that policy. A secondary school with 1,000 pupils, a third on the Pupil Premium, will be receiving around an extra

Friday

21 Sep 2012

James Forsyth

Nigel Farage’s real strategy

Nigel Farage’s very public willingness to explore a UKIP-Tory electoral pact in exchange for a pledge from David Cameron to hold a referendum on EU membership is, I suspect, designed to achieve two things. First, it is meant to flush out Cameron. If Cameron declines the offer, Farage will be able to claim that only UKIP are the only party to vote for if you want an In/Out choice on the UK’s EU membership. It’ll undercut the Tory offer of a renegotiation referendum. Second, by floating the offer he makes it more likely that individual Tory MPs and candidates might sign up to the offer themselves, pledging to back an

Fraser Nelson

The death of the party conference

The party conference season is now underway, with Lib Dems gathering in Brighton. It’s time to admit that our political parties are in a bad way, and this has nothing to do with voter apathy. Britain’s political culture is bursting with life, it’s the parties that are dying. This will be horribly apparent in the conferences. David Cameron couldn’t even fill the hall for his speech last year, the first time in living memory that this happened. This is no reflection on his (usually excellent) speeches but the decay of conferences in general. Since they moved to the cities, they became geared at those with expense accounts rather than membership

Steerpike

Telling tales: some infamous conference moments

What could possibly go wrong when you lock 10,000 political hacks and flacks in a hotel for 96 hours and let lobbyists pick up the tab? Well that’s party conference for you, and there have been some excellent tales of drunken debauchery over the last few years. The most riotous parties are the ones upstairs in the private suites of the main conference hotel. Representing the Tory side, Lord Strathclyde fills his bathtub with ice and champagne and opens his doors every year. Rumour has it that he always deserves a magnum for later. Last year, one Tory MP went so far as to punch a colleague. Other MPs had to drag one of them away. It was all denials

Isabel Hardman

Farage’s floundering highlights Cameron’s EU challenge

By the end of his 8.10 interview on the Today programme, Nigel Farage was struggling a little. Once John Humphrys had taken him away from his hobby horse of a European Union Referendum, the UKIP leader started to wobble. Humphrys: Let’s have a look at your policies. A bit puzzling, in a way, and it’s not the first time a political leader has done this. You seem to want to cut back taxes, you want to roll back the state, and yet, you want to spend loads of money on loads of things. Farage: Well, we want to spend more money on defence, that is absolutely true, and we think,

Isabel Hardman

Coffee House Interview: Chris Skidmore on Britannia Unchained, ‘lazy’ Brits, and how the government should be unpopular

Before it had even appeared in reviewers’ postbags, the book that Chris Skidmore co-authored with four other Conservative MPs had created quite a stir in Westminster. ‘Brits so lazy’, said the Sun, about a chapter in Britannia Unchained which describes the British as being ‘among the worst idlers in the world’. That claim provoked rage from left-wingers, with Labour’s Chuka Umunna calling on David Cameron to ‘distance himself’ from the comments, which he said were ‘deeply insulting’. But Skidmore seems entirely unperturbed by the outcry. In fact, when we meet in his Westminster office, he seems quite taken with the idea that politicians should take a great deal of unpopularity

Sebastian Payne

Can UKIP become a serious political party?

UKIP members are gathering for their annual conference in Birmingham today and frustratingly for the party, it remains a niche political event. Unlike the media explosion for the other three political gatherings, UKIP’s two day rally will have no wall-to-wall TV coverage and little in-depth analysis of the speeches. But since Nigel Farage gathered his flock last year, Britain’s other party has seen its profile raised substantially. Martin Kettle admitted in the Guardian this week that UKIP are now a ‘force to be reckoned with’ who could become kingmakers that will ‘shape the 2015 election and the politics of Britain and Europe for a generation’. Polling suggests they are indeed a significant political

Thursday

20 Sep 2012

Jonathan Jones

What are the key states for Obama vs Romney?

It’s becoming clear which will be the battleground states of the 2012 US Presidential election. With less than seven weeks to go, just nine states look competitive: Colorado and Nevada in the Southwest; Iowa, Ohio and Wisconsin in the Midwest; Florida, North Carolina and Virginia in the South; and New Hampshire in the Northeast. Of the safe states, Barack Obama can count on 18 (plus DC), against Mitt Romney’s 23. Romney’s path to victory looks very tough for two main reasons. First, as the below map (which I produced at 270towin.com) shows, the safe states give Obama 237 electoral votes to Romney’s 191. That means Obama needs just 33 of

Isabel Hardman

The pupil premium and profit-making schools could be a winning combination

Ask any Liberal Democrat what their party has achieved in government, and the answer will involve the words ‘pupil premium’. It was a key manifesto pledge in 2010, and is one of the policies that the party is proudest of from its time in government so far. It’ll be sure to come up time and time again in speeches in Brighton, too. Which is why it’s rather awkward that with two days to go to the Liberal Democrat autumn conference, Ofsted has revealed ‘disturbing findings’ about the way schools are actually administering the premium. Chief Sir Michael Wilshaw said the extra £600 per pupil from a disadvantaged background was largely

Fraser Nelson

Nick Clegg’s viral apology video

The free publicity which comes with party political broadcasts is more powerful than the broadcast itself: nowadays, our MPs hope their messages will go viral. Nick Clegg’s apology has: and how. The below video has his voice being digitally altered (like Cher’s in Believe) but the result is far catchier. It demands to be watched: The video-maker has done Clegg a favour. Only the most cold-hearted cynic would feel a tinge of sympathy for him here, which may be been the idea behind the video. What Tony Blair called the ‘masochism strategy’ where you apologise and get visibly beaten up, ideally by a pensioner, until voters start to pity you.

Sebastian Payne

The View from 22 — Nick Clegg’s martyrdom, the personal statement scam and being sacked by David Cameron

Will Nick Clegg’s political career come to a crashing end in tandem with the end of the coalition? In this week’s magazine, James Forsyth examines how the Lib Dem leader has put the coalition cause ahead of both his party and own political career. On the latest View from 22 podcast, James examines the Lib Dem’s strategy shift back to making the coalition work: ‘I think this will be the last Lib Dem conference in which Nick Clegg receives a relatively warm reception. I think even the critics in his party know it’s far too early to change leader. Nick Clegg has decided to double down on coalition. Just this Monday, he

Wednesday

19 Sep 2012

The Spectator

Whitehall’s billions

Two weeks ago Justine Greening was demoted for the offence of sticking to the Conservative manifesto on which she was elected and refusing to back down over the proposal for a third runway at Heathrow. This week she has shown that she is far from being demoralised by the experience; in fact, it might turn out to be the making of her. She has grasped in a fortnight what seemed to evade Andrew Mitchell, her predecessor at the Department for International Development (DfID), for two-and-a-half years. She has taken the trouble to examine her department’s swollen budget and ask herself: is all this money really being wisely spent? The revelation that

Peter Jones

European funding

To prop up the euro, a German court has agreed to allow Germany to fund the European Central Bank (ECB) so that it can bail out failing states. But it has imposed a cap on Germany’s contribution which only the Bundestag and Bundesrat together can overrule. Will the two parliaments ever do it? Certainly Themistocles would. By 483 bc, the lead mines at Laurium on the southern tip of Attica (Athens’s hinterland) had produced an over-abundance of silver to the tune of 100 talents. The people’s Assembly (male Athenians over 18) debated a motion to copy the citizens of the fabulously gold-rich island of Siphnos and divide it up among

James Forsyth

Clegg’s attempt to repair tuition fee damage

Going into the last election, many of Nick Clegg’s closest allies and, I suspect, the Lib Dem leader himself found the tuition fees pledge embarrassing. It was precisely the kind of opportunistic policy that they had tried to wean the party off. But when it came to the election and it was still, despite their best efforts, party policy they decided to run with it. As soon as the election results came in, it was clear that Clegg’s exploitation of the subject was going to cause him problems seeing as both Tories and Labour were committed to the Browne review which was almost certain to come out for higher fees.

Isabel Hardman

Nick Clegg apologises for tuition fees pledge

In a video message released this evening, Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg apologised for his party’s pre-election pledge to vote against any rise in tuition fees. Clegg said: ‘We made a promise before the election that we would vote against any rise in fees under any circumstances. But that was a mistake. It was a pledge made with the best of intentions – but we shouldn’t have made a promise we weren’t absolutely sure we could deliver. ‘I shouldn’t have committed to a policy that was so expensive when there was no money around. Not least when the most likely way we’d end up in Government was in coalition with

James Forsyth

Lib Dems committing to radical future for the coalition

Nick Clegg, Danny Alexander, David Laws and a couple of Lib Dem advisers spent Monday at Chequers. They were there to discuss the final details of the coalition’s mid-term review with David Cameron and George Osborne. I understand that this document will now contain new coalition commitments on the economy, education, welfare, childcare and social mobility. As I say in tomorrow’s Spectator, I suspect that this meeting tells us more about the state of the government than what Clegg will say in Brighton or Cameron in Birmingham. It is further evidence that after a period of coalition paralysis, the two leaderships have decided that their best hope is to go

Jonathan Jones

Polls show big leads for Labour, but bad ratings for Ed Miliband

Over the past two days, we’ve had polls from four different pollsters, and all of them show big leads for Labour. Yesterday, Populus gave Ed Miliband’s party a 15-point lead — the largest lead the pollster has ever shown for Labour. Today, Ipsos MORI shows Labour ahead by 11 points and TNS BMRB have them up by 12. The latest YouGov tracker gives Labour a nine-point lead, although averaging their polls over the last week makes it more like ten points. The precise margins may be different, but all of these results would — if replicated in a general election — result in a large Labour majority and hand Ed

Douglas Murray

Mitt Romney’s ‘gaffe’ is nothing of the sort

The papers today are full of the latest alleged ‘gaffe’ by Mitt Romney. It has become a staple of US election coverage that any Democrat’s foreign policy fumble is a ‘mis-speak’ while any Republican saying something even mildly contentious – as opposed to wrong – is a world-class clanger which shows them to be unfit for office. Today’s Romney ‘gaffe’ relates to his reported comments on the Middle East. This is not exactly a region in which the Obama administration has covered itself in glory. But even as Obama’s policy failings are being felt, it is Romney who is being lambasted for, among other things, his claim that ‘the Palestinians

The Spectator

Sacked minister spills the reshuffle beans

In tomorrow’s Spectator, an anonymous former minister recounts their experiences of David Cameron’s reshuffle. They describe the walk in to see the Prime Minister – through the back entrance where the cameras cannot see ministers arrive – and the way the Prime Minister tries to placate them by explaining that there are ‘303 someone elses’ that he needs to keep happy. You can read the full copy below, or in the magazine from tomorrow: Divorce is something I have yet to experience personally but Dave’s reshuffle has set me up nicely for any future threat to my own nuptial bliss. Out of the blue comes the call. It’s Dave’s office.