Politics

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

Matthew Parris

Not your ordinary, everyday Tory selection contest in Stratford-on-Avon

Last Friday (as I write) I chaired the meeting to select a prospective Conservative parliamentary candidate for the constituency of Stratford-on-Avon. I say ‘chaired’ but the modern term is (I learned) ‘mediated’. My preference for the more old-fashioned verb will have been shared by almost all the assembled ranks of the Stratford-on-Avon Conservative Association: we were — very few of us, they or I — in the first flush of youth. We don’t do ‘mediated’. But around 300 of them came (the selection was open only to party members) on a freezing Warwickshire night, for a meeting that would last from seven until around midnight. Some had brought Tupperware containers

Martin Vander Weyer

A VAT rise may be no laughing matter, but it’s better than the alternatives

Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business And so to VAT — an opening that I realise sounds about as enticing as a job ad for a shorthand typist in the Prime Minister’s office. Frankly, I doubt even Bob Monkhouse had a decent gag about VAT in his repertoire. But like many things that are not funny — Jonathan Ross hosting the Bafta awards, for example — tax on consumption is an inescapable fact of modern life. So, having ducked the topic last week in favour of high-class name- dropping, I’ll do my best this week, prompted by a Conservative statement that ‘We have absolutely no plans to increase VAT’. That

James Forsyth

The election speculation has given Cameron an opening

Tory spring forum gives David Cameron a chance to regain the momentum. The media will be there in numbers and I suspect that the rumours of an early election mean that it will get more attention than it otherwise would have done. Cameron’s speech is a real chance to show what the Tories are going to fight the election on. The speech isn’t as important as the one he gave at the 2007 conference when Brown appeared set to call an election, but Cameron would be well advised to reprise a couple of tricks from it. He should speak without a text—Cameron is just such a better speaker that way.

Defence debate? No thanks, we are British

A few days ago, BBC Newsnight ran in effect the first live TV debate between the three parties when Secretary of State for Defence, Bob Ainsworth, Shadow Defence Secretary, Liam Fox, and Liberal Democrat defence spokesperson Nick Harvey shared a platform at the Imperial War museum. The programme was meant to focus on the main issues facing the future of British defence and security. In the event, it defaulted to a discussion about Afghanistan. Despite Jeremy Paxman’s prodding, many of the strategic questions were shirked as an audience of generals and airmen fought each other over which service had played a bigger role in the Afghan theatre, and the issue

James Forsyth

The Tories need to talk about immigration

As the Tories prepare to head to the seaside, Tim Montgomerie has published a ten point plan to get the Tory campaign back on track. The plan is already causing much discussion in Tory circles. His main points are that the Tories need to sharpen their economic message, use William Hague more, sort out the structure of the campaign, warn of the dangers of a hung parliament and ram home to voters just how badly Labour has failed.   What is getting the most attention, though, is Tim’s suggestion that the Tories should talk about immigration. I tend to agree with Tim on this point. It was a strategic mistake

A tyrant surrounded by cowards no longer

Well, the Chancellor’s not for budging. Alistair Darling stands by not “some of” but “all of” his “forces of hell” comments. Martin Bright wrote the politics column in this week’s mag, arguing that opponents are intimidated by the political mobsters surrounding Brown, and who Brown encourages a la Henry II. Martin names Charlie Whelan and Damian McBride as the goons, and Ed Balls is rumoured to be the consigliere.   Peter Watt claimed that Douglas Alexander admitted that most senior Cabinet ministers loathed Brown and his vicarious emotional terrorism, a sense reinforced by Darling’s comments. If that’s the case, why has Brown not been removed? Cowardice is an unpleasant but

Is Brown about to call the election?

Guido’s got the inside track that the Beeb have been told not to take the weekend off, and the Tory lead has been cut to five points in the Telegraph’s Ipsos Mori poll. A five point lead is hung parliament territory and Labour could win the most seats – further evidence, as if any were needed, that the force is with Labour. There are a couple of other reasons he may go now. Peter Hain has written an article for the Guardian, wooing Lib Dem voters (more on that later) – could that article be a prelude to the big announcement? Fourth quarter growth figures have been revised upwards, to

Cutter Brown

Gordon Brown’s interview with the Economist is completely brazen. With a fine disregard for facts, and subsumed amid specious waffle, Brown declares that he’s been consistent on cuts. ‘I believe if you look at my interviews there’s absolute consistency in what I’m saying. We were saying right through the early stages of the crisis that it was important for there to be fiscal stimulus. And so the clear message was about fiscal stimulus. We said that at a certain point we would have to come in and announce our public spending plans for future years, but this was not the right time to do it. And it still isn’t the

James Forsyth

Getting the Tories back on track

At the beginning of this week the key figures in the Tory election campaign gathered together in Notting Hill to try and work out what was going wrong with the Tory campaign, why the Tory lead has halved since December. Our cover this week attempts to answer this question. My take is that the problem is largely caused by the structure of the campaign. Successful campaigns tend to have a chief strategist and a campaign manager. The strategist’s job is to work out what the election is about and the campaign manager’s role is to implement that vision and take charge of day to day tactics. The Tory problem is

Alex Massie

Immigration: The BNP are Winning and Britain is Losing

One of the odder aspects of contemporary politics is the amount of attention lavished upon the goons at the BNP. Anyone would think they were about to win the election. But they’re not. Nevertheless, grant Nick Griffin and his pals this: they’ve managed to hijack the debate – such as it is – on immigration. Despite what the media might have you think, there is no party of open borders in this country. Instead both the Tories and the Labour party effectively concede the argument to the BNP. Labour boast that they have immigration “under control” and then the Tories complain that the government isn’t “cracking down” hard enough. The

Brown v Blair: a comedy

First the tragedy, then the farce: if there was something dark, perhaps shocking, about last weekend’s bullying allegations, then the latest Rawnsley revelations veer towards the hilarious.  They’re centred around Brown’s efforts to oust Tony Blair, and the Guardian covers them here.  I won’t pre-empt your enjoyment of them, except to highlight this passage from the report: “Rawnsley reveals that Brown rang Blair while he was staying with the Queen at Balmoral. He was furious that Alan Milburn, Blair’s close ally, had written a piece supporting the prime minister’s right to stay at No 10. Rawnsley writes: ‘The chancellor’s fury was titanically demented even by his standards. ‘You put fucking

How British: a tea party

Don’t you think that ‘The Ship Money Movement’ is a more appropriate name for a British anti-tax forum? You know, given the connotations of ‘Tea Party’ in these climes? Titles are instructive, and, as James wrote yesterday, the British right has a growing fascination with its American counterpart. Perhaps I’m over doing it, but it seems a testament to the State’s dominance in post-war Britain that the country’s libertarian tradition, extending back through Burke, Bolingbroke, Locke, Milton and to Hampden himself, is no longer the right’s primary inspiration. Putting my slightly absurd ruminations aside, the coming of the Tea Party Movement to Britain is significant. Dan Hannan will address the

Alex Massie

Bush on Palin: Charisma Ain’t Enough

Jeb Bush that is. And, it’s fair to say that he doesn’t seem enormously enthusiastic about Palin’s political prospects: My personal belief is that for Governor Palin to be a successful candidate for higher office, she needs to take this charisma she has and also add to it some depth of understanding of the complexity of life that we’re living in today. If she had the combination of that, she would be a formidable candidate.” And: I mean, I don’t know what her deal is, but my belief is in 2010 and 2012, public leaders need to have intellectual curiosity. Well that all seems fair enough even if Jeb* has

Many BNP voters’ concerns are legitimate and should be recognised as such

Frank Field was characteristically forthright on the Today programme this morning. “I don’t believe, given the strains (on the economy), we will be able to maintain an open door policy without serious unrest on the streets,” he said, and this brings me to a Sunny Hundal article on the media’s approach to the BNP. Hundal is extremely eloquent but his premises are ill-conceived. He aligns the BNP exclusively with racism and immigration, because it follows that a racist is illegitimate and can be consigned to irrelevance. He writes: ‘If you want to vote BNP and think people of different cultures and races are scary, why not just say so? Every

Lloyd Evans

True romance

‘Any closer and they’ll start kissing,’ said Cameron. The PM and his beloved chancellor were seated side by side at PMQs today, chatting showily throughout. Their rhubarb-rhubarb conversation was intended to quell the rumours of civil war in Downing Street. The ploy misfired. Two men conversing don’t both speak at each other simultaneously. But that scarcely mattered. The session was the rowdiest and least illuminating of the year so far. At times it was noisier than the Pamplona bull-run. Cameron began by trying to elicit answers about the appalling mortality rates at Staffordshire Hospital. Brown adopted his cenotaph grimace and reeled off a list of inquiries, investigations and disciplinary sanctions

And what about Ed Balls?

Two related points, worth repeating. The first from Ben Brogan: “Mr Brown is on surer ground on a narrow point, in that in all likelihood he did not explicitly order his Eighth Circle chums to unleash hell against Mr Darling. Then again, he didn’t need to. His reaction to the Chancellor’s Guardian interview will have had the required Henry II effect. If Dave wanted some sport [in PMQs], surely, he should have asked whether Ed Balls ordered his friends to undermine Mr Darling. He wanted the job after all, and as has long been realised, there was what amounted to a Balls operation within the Brown operation designed to promote

PMQs live blog | 24 February 2010

Stay tuned for live coverage from 1200. 1200: Alistair Darling is sat next to Brown. How cosy. 1201: And we’re off.  Brown starts with condolences for fallens soldiers – sadly, seven names to read out. 1202: Labour MP Jamie Reed asks Brown for reassurances that the public will one day see the taxpayers’ cash that’s been pumped into the banks. He gets in a dig at George Osborne’s public shares plan.  Brown responds by banging on about the G20. 1204: Cameron now. He leads off with a question about the deaths at the Stafford Hospital – asking whether a private inquiry is sufficient to tragedy and the public interest. 1206: