Politics Archives

Monday

8 Mar 2010

Voter turnout is still higher in Iraq than in the UK

Ok, so it’s down on the 75 percent achieved in 2005, but it’s still striking – encouraging, even – that voter turnout was at 62 percent for the recent Iraqi general elections. That’s higher than the 61.4 percent for the last UK general election, and, lest it need saying, we didn’t have to deal with deadly bomb and mortar attacks. With the “chasm” between voters and the political class as it is, in this country, you suspect that our turnout figures will be even smaller this time around.

The Spectator

Just in case you missed them… | 8 March 2010

…here are some of the posts made at Spectator.co.uk over the weekend. Fraser Nelson asks what it does it matter if Samantha Cameron voted Labour once. James Forsyth notes that Sir John Major accuses Brown of conduct profoundly unbecoming a Prime Minister, and argues that the Lib Dems’ electoral rhetoric will make it much harder for them to make a deal in the event of a hung parliament. Peter Hoskin watches Cameron deliver a spot-on speech, and wonders if Nick Clegg’s latest intervention will save Labour a post-election Brown leadership. Mark Bathgate wants a serious economic debate. Martin Bright believes that Cameron must show a ruthless streak. And Alex Massie

Peter Hoskin

Guess what Miliband and Mandelson are going on about…

Fourteen years on from “education, education, education,” Labour seems to have hit upon three new priorities for government: “Ashcroft, Ashcroft, Ashcroft”. Sure, we all knew that they would push this story as hard and as fast as it could go. But it still says a lot about how they will go about their election campaign, when two senior ministers are still going heavy on the Tory Lord this morning. In interview with the Guardian, Peter Mandelson says that Ashcroft has got Cameron “by the balls”. And, in the Telegraph, David Miliband claims that William Hague “can’t be an effective Foreign Secretary,” after his role in the affair. Some of

Sunday

7 Mar 2010

Mark Bathgate

Bring on the serious economic debate

Why does Britain fall for financial spin so often? The question goes well beyond the great confidence trick of Gordon Brown’s ten years in the Treasury. I’m just back from three weeks in Australia. What’s always struck me in the years I’ve gone there is how different the newspapers/news shows/political debates are. They are well informed about macro-economics, and there is much less of the spin/personality culture of the mainstream media in the UK. Canada is exactly the same. Last week, the Canadian budget was published – a very clear and credible path to getting budget back to balance within three years. One of their officials explained to me that

Alex Massie

Red Meat Toryism? Part 2.

Commenting on this post, Tim Montgomerie writes: Did you actually read what I wrote Alex? Not once did I call for an end to the new Toryism. I advocated blending new and old messages. I did not suggest “banging on” about immigration but as voters’ number two issue it should be part of the mix. I didn’t even advocate talking about Europe at all. I said our three main messages should be (1) the economy, debt and regulating the banks; (2) immigration and crime; and (3) protecting the NHS and the vulnerable. Your readers who read what I actually wrote will get a very different sense of my argument. Now

Alex Massie

Bravo Iceland!

Our plucky friends in the north have done the right thing: Icelanders have overwhelmingly rejected a plan to repay Britain and the Netherlands billions of pounds lost when Reykjavik’s banks collapsed in 2008 Partial referendum results from around a third of the cast votes showed 93% opposed the deal and less than 2% supported it. The rest cast invalid votes. Good for them. Quite why the Icelandic government should be liable for the UK’s entirely voluntary decision to bail out Icesave customers is a mystery. Still, it was the use of anti-terrorism laws to seize and freeze Icelandic assets in the UK that was especially disgraceful and, of course, a

Peter Hoskin

Have the Lib Dems just saved Labour from a post-election Brown leadership?

To be honest, the leg-flashing that the Lib Dems are doing in front of the Tories and Labour just doesn’t really grab my attention. Their overtures and innuendo may, or may not, turn out to be significant in a few weeks time – but we need a general election before we can judge either way. In the meantime, they’d be best off keeping their positioning to themselves, and getting on with an election campaign for which they actually have some fairly attractive policies. This story, though, is worth noting down. Apparently, in the event of a hung Parliament, Nick Clegg just couldn’t bring himself to work with Gordon Brown. Labour,

Martin Bright

The Filth and the Fury

On the back of Andrew Rawnsley’s revelations, I decided to write about Gordon Brown’s “bad citizens” for the politics column of the Spectator. Under the magazine’s new online rules, this is only available a week after publication. But now you can read the filth and the fury in all its sordid glory. I have since been approached by one of the players named in the piece to say that I had misinterpreted his concern for my welfare as threatening behaviour. This, I would suggest, is the whole problem.

Martin Bright

Cameron Must Show a Ruthless Streak

There is an excellent piece on the Ashcroft affair from Martin Ivens in the Sunday Times today. He quotes a member of Team Cameron: “Why didn’t David just take Ashcroft out and shoot him? His work is done. What’s the point of him hanging about?” Well said. No one has quite got to the bottom of why the Tory lead has shrunk. But one reason might be the sense that David Cameron is not quite as decisive as he ideally should be. He lost his nerve over George Osborne when he became an embarrassment in Corfu and he seems to have lost it again over Ashcroft. Cameron has modelled his

Saturday

6 Mar 2010

Peter Hoskin

Cameron gets his message spot-on

Just a quick post to encourage CoffeeHousers to read David Cameron’s speech to his party’s Welsh conference today. It’s not just the clearest, and most sensible, exposition of the Tories’ economic message that I’ve come across so far – it’s also the finest overall speech that I can remember Cameron giving for some time. Plenty of hard-hitting passages, both attacking Labour’s record and – crucially – setting out a positive alternative. What really makes it so impressive is the simplicity of its central message: that you can achieve better government, and better services, for less money. The Tories have been feeling their way around this theme for a while now

Peter Hoskin

Brown seems to have blustered his way through yet another potential crisis

Yesterday, Gordon Brown argued that he curbed defence spending to prevent the public finances from spiralling out of control – but added that he had still given the MoD everything they had asked for. So, when it’s anything but defence spending, he boasts of all that extra “investment”. But when it comes to defence, he suddenly grows a fiscal conscience, of sorts. If we weren’t talking about our country’s ability to fight two wars, there’d be something crudely hilarious about it all. Today, various defence figures have rounded on Brown; arguing, rightly, that his tractor statistics avoided the fundamental point – that, despite increases in the defence budget, the military

James Forsyth

Why does it take a crisis to sting Cameron into action?

James Forsyth reviews the week in politics The bar of the Brighton Metropole hotel was packed on Saturday night, with the sort of people locals would want to avoid. It was the Tory spring conference, and the journalists and aides were drawn to the bar not only by the prospect of doing a whole conference’s worth of drinking in one night but by news of a ‘seismic’ poll in the Sunday Times. If there was going to be conference drama, no one wanted to miss it. When midnight passed with no news, anticipation heightened. In the early hours of the morning, the news arrived: the YouGov poll pointed to a

Damian Thompson

The public sector at prayer

The government’s fiercely secularist agenda has turned very few Christians into Tory voters. Damian Thompson asks why the Churches have kept faith in New Labour Gordon Brown’s Cabinet is the least Christian in British history. Its members sneer at the Churches’ teachings about sexuality. They bully faith schools with relish, making them talk to primary schoolchildren about sexual intercourse. They are just about to force Catholic schools to advise teenage girls on where to procure an abortion. They want to compel religious institutions to employ people whose beliefs run entirely counter to the values of those institutions. They favour ‘assisted dying’ and are surreptitiously working to enshrine it as a

Friday

5 Mar 2010

James Forsyth

Why the Tories’ internal polling matters

Iain Martin and Tim Montgomerie are both reporting that the Conservatives have hired YouGov to do polling for them. This might seem like the ultimate Westminster insider story but it will actually have ramifications for the election campaign as a whole. I understand that the Tory deal with YouGov will mean that they will get polling within the day on their morning announcements and the like. They will also have numbers on which moments in the leaders’ debates resonated with the voters about two hours after these debates finish, enabling them to have whole ad campaigns ready to go for the next morning. The nature of the party’s polling has

The Spectator

The week that was | 5 March 2010

Here are some posts made on Spectator.co.uk over the past week: Fraser Nelson explains why the Tories should talk about immigration, and faces the protesters. James Forsyth wonders whether the Tories are over the worst of their wobble, and welcomes Michael Gove’s efforts to restore the educational gold standard. Peter Hoskin says that any fallout the Tories face over Lord Ashcroft is of their own making, and watches Gordon Brown go crimefighting. Daniel Korski argues that Britain should return the Elgin Marbles to Greece. Susan Hill asks: where does the blame lie? Rod Liddle thinks that the Guardian is loathsome and loathful. Alex Massie sets out the problem of too

Alex Massie

Wilders in London

Like Mr Eugenides, I’m on record opposing the disgraceful ban that prevented Geert Wilders from entering the United Kingdom. So in that sense it’s a good thing that he’s in London today to show his little film to Lord Pearson and his pals. What I don’t understand, like our redoubtable Greek friend, is why UKIP should be so keen to associate themselves with Wilders. For a party that I’d thought spent a lot of time stressing that it should in no way, shape or form be considered a kind of mini, more respectable BNP it’s curious how keen they are to chum around with people such as Wilders. Each to

Peter Hoskin

All quiet on the Chilcot front

I just took a quick stroll around the block from Old Queen St, to check out the situation on the ground outside the Chilcot Inquiry. The most striking thing is how few protestors there are – about ten at most, I’d say, and a fraction of the number that marched out against Blair a few weeks ago. Brown doesn’t even make one placard’s list of – and I quote – “Lying R. Soles,” which includes Blair, Campbell, Straw and Goldsmith. It’s all rather suggestive of how Brown has managed, over the years, to separate himself from those who made the political and moral case for war. But there lies the

Fraser Nelson

Brown’s betrayal of Basra is the real issue here

Might Gordon Brown get away with it at the Chilcot Inquiry today? I suspect so. The media seems obsessed with the run-up to war, whereas the real crime was the betrayal of Basra. Brown made false claims to Parliament about the fall of violence in the city which, as he would have known, was being left in the hands of Shiite death squads. He would have known that, as the Chilcot Inquiry established, we had just a couple of hundred soldiers trying to keep peace in a city of millions. He misled Britain out of Basra as knowingly and mendaciously as Blair led Britain into Iraq – leaving the people

Thursday

4 Mar 2010

Peter Hoskin

Tory lead cut to 2 percent in 60 key marginals

One of the refrains made in response to the recent spate of opinion polls is that they don’t really capture what’s going on in the marginals – the real battlgrounds where the election will be fought. Well, now we have a YouGov/Channel 4 poll which specifically covers 60 key marginal sets, and it provides more evidence that Labour are closing ground on the Tories. Here are the headline figures, compared to the last marginals poll for Channel 4, a year ago: Conservatives — 39 (down 4) Labour — 37 (up 1) Lib Dems — 35 (up 2) And YouGov’s Peter Kellner provides a useful explanation of what they mean: “The

Peter Hoskin

Any fallout that the Tories face over Ashcroft is of their own making<br />

Although the heat seems to be coming off Lord Ashcroft himself, attention is now rapidly focussing on the Tory leadership. I mean, it was one thing when William Hague admitted that he didn’t know about Ashcroft’s tax status until a few months ago – but quite another when it emerges that David Cameron only found out “within the last month”. As I said in my last post, there seems to have been, at the very best, astonishing naivety on the part of the Cameron & Co. They should have seen these problems coming months ago, and tried to defuse them then – rather than being forced on to the defensive,