All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
No-one should be surprised that Standard Life has warned it might leave Scotland should the country vote for independence later this year. It is not exactly a secret that Edinburgh’s financial services industry is concerned by the possible – indeed plausible – implications of independence. The suggestion – sorry, the threat – that it might
How would you feel about a couple doing IVF just in order to find the embryos most likely to to be gay… and chuck them out? Does that sound like eugenics to you? What about the other way round: what if a gay couple wanted to maximise their chance of a having gay baby —
History, Edmund Burke wrote, is ‘a pact between the dead, the living and the yet unborn.’ Nowhere is this pact more important than in our relationship with nature. Conservative governments have always sought to protect and enhance the natural environment – whether through Disraeli’s Public Health Act, which sought to limit the environmental impact of
Is David Cameron’s new gameplan to look to the northern states for allies? Fraser Nelson is joined on the podcast by Stephen Booth of Open Europe, to discuss the influence that people such as the Dutch PM Mark Rutte – who has a clear and impressive reform plan – and Angela Merkel are having on our PM. Could Cameron
The Coalition is merely cohabiting now – that much has been clear for a while. But one partner doesn’t seem to acknowledge quite how unreasonable its behaviour is. The Lib Dems have been cheesing off the Tories with what have appeared to be an increasing number of increasingly heated attacks: from David Laws wading into
Something strange is happening in the world of green Conservatism. After the PM decided to take out the ‘green crap’ last year, greeny Tories might have been forgiven for beating a bit of a retreat and licking their wounds. Well, if they did, they didn’t take much time to do it: now they’re fighting hard
Earlier this week David Cameron threatened the Lib Dems with divorce. Today, two of their senior figures offered to kiss and make up. Sir Alan Beith and Sir Bob Russell, bearing their knighthoods like dented old battle-shields, made their overtures at PMQs. Each of these leathery old libertarians seems to have discovered his inner Tory.
‘The cyber-nat activity is disgraceful. They will trash anyone who disagrees with them. Their intention is to make people keep their heads down. Salmond could stop it, but he doesn’t choose to,’ said Alistair Darling, leader of the Better Together campaign, last month. Supporters of Scottish nationalism have dominated the web for the last five
Ed Miliband again went on climate change and the floods at Prime Minister’s Questions. Miliband believes that Cameron is vulnerable on this subject, that people will notice how Cameron – who used to say ‘Vote Blue, Go Green’ – has now gone cold on this issue. listen to ‘PMQs: Cameron and Miliband on climate change’
So, the IRA terror suspect, John Downey, will now not face a trial for his alleged involvement in the Hyde Park and Regent’s Park bombings of 1982, in which eleven soldiers (as well as seven horses) were murdered by nail bombs. The former Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Hain seems to be delighted about this and
Much hilarity among those of a leftish persuasion in Westminster that the Conservatives might dare call themselves the Workers’ Party, as Grant Shapps enthusiastically did yesterday. Mind you, when Shapps gave his speech making this claim alongside Sir John Major yesterday, journalists were excluded, so he might not have said it at all. But assuming
So after all the to-ing and fro-ing over whether the minimum wage will get a big fat rise, the Low Pay Commission has recommended that the rate rise by 3 per cent to £6.50 an hour from October 2014. George Osborne had said that he wanted to ‘see an above-inflation increase in the minimum wage’,
It’s curious that the story about the National Council for Civil Liberties and its links with the Paedophile Information Exchange is big news now, since it’s been common knowledge for many years, and written about in the Catholic press on a number of occasions. I researched the story back in 2006 or 2007, along with
What’s the problem with that Balance of Competences report on Freedom of Movement that still hasn’t been published? Nick Clegg gave his monthly press conference today, and was asked whether he had a problem with the report, which is believed to have been delayed because it painted too positive a picture of immigration. Clegg said:
The Sun’s report that pensioner benefits will be included in the overall cap on welfare spending highlights an interesting shift that this policy will cause. George Osborne will set out the detail of the cap on Annually Managed Expenditure in the budget in a few weeks’ time. It will put pressure on all Work and
Introducing House of Cards, Westminster redux. Many thanks to all the politicians who took part.
Go to war with the Daily Mail at your peril: Ed Miliband did it over its ‘the man who hated Britain’ column and now perhaps the Labour party is seeing the revenge for that with the paper’s ongoing insistence that Harriet Harman apologise for the National Council for Civil Liberties’ links to the Paedophile Information
Speaking at Conservative Campaign Headquarters today, having been invited by Chairman Grant Shapps to launch a new apprenticeship scheme, Sir John Major: – Set out the moral mission of the Conservative Party, saying: ‘We exist as a political party to help people reach their ambitions and to make sure our country is safe and secure
While Number 10 is pouring cold water on suggestions that the Prime Minister might rule out a second coalition in the 2015 manifesto, his MPs have given it a rather icy reception. If the hints about him preferring a minority government to governing with the Lib Dems were supposed to reassure those on the Right
Angela Merkel is, as James explains in this week’s magazine, central to David Cameron’s hopes of getting anything meaty at all from his renegotiation and reform of the European Union. Her address to Parliament later this week will be scrutinised for every hint that she might support one reform or another – and for her
The US Army’s cuts are good for Britain. They will force our European allies to think about their own defence and re-evaluate their policies. This will highlight the benefits of NATO’s guarantees and put the focus in the EU on what matters. For over twenty years European members of NATO have had a free ride.
If Grant Shapps and John Major gave a speech but no journalists were there to cover it, did it really happen? That’s what happened today. The Tories invited one pooled camera into their headquarters to see the former prime minister stand next to the party chairman in a belated attempt to prove that at least
That David Cameron is reportedly considering committing to minority government above coalition is a strong message to his backbenchers that he’s not preparing to hop back into bed with Nick Clegg and co in 2015. They have been growing a little feverish about the idea, and ministers have made it known in the party that they
Gavin Grant, the CEO of the RSPCA, is stepping down from his role after just over two years in the job because there are ‘concerns about his health’, the charity announced today. The announcement will be met with a mixture of delight and dismay; delight from those who believed that his influence was shifting the
A friend of mine, quite a distinguished lawyer, takes the view that marriage ceased to make sense after no-fault divorces came in. What, he says sternly, is the point of a contract when there’s no sanction if you break it? Well, quite. But if no-fault divorce pretty well invalidates marriage after the event, prenups do
Whatever happened to Scotland’s upper-middle class? That’s one of the questions asked by Hugo Rifkind in his characteristically interesting column this week. Why, more to the point, are they so reluctant to play a part in the independence stushie? When did they become so bashful? It is time, Hugo says, for the timid posh folk
Perhaps it’s premature to say this now that the Russian prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, has sounded off about Russian citizens in Ukraine being in danger, but it strikes me that Russia has behaved in the current crisis with a certain commendable restraint. Judging from most pundits in most British papers, there is no redeeming element to
David Cameron says he wants the case that he makes for the Union and against Scottish independence to be ‘unremittingly positive’. Is it? In an interview with BBC News, the Prime Minister said: ‘That’s my whole argument, which is go back to the big picture, and I think this family of nations is better off
Russia has been presented as one of the bad guys in the coverage of the turmoil in Ukraine. But today, Sir Menzies Campbell told the Commons that the one thing that linked the three countries mentioned in William Hague’s urgent statement on Ukraine, Syria and Iran was that ‘progress, however limited, was made as a
One of the regular duties of a Work and Pensions minister is to defend his or her programme of reform against criticisms from all sides about how it is administered. At today’s Work and Pensions questions in the Commons, Mike Penning didn’t try all that hard, though, to defend Atos Healthcare and its contract to
At Lib Dem conference last autumn, the Liberal Democrats couldn’t tell you often enough how they had saved the quango Natural England from the Tory axe. Both Nick Clegg and Ed Davey made a big deal out of it in their conference speeches, portraying the Tory desire to abolish it as evidence of their coalition
Today’s Cabinet meeting in Aberdeen, now underway, has given ministers plenty of opportunity to stare earnestly at Scottish things while trying to make the case for the Union. Here are some of Mr Steerpike’s favourites. All captions gratefully received in the comments…
You will recall that, according to the greatest account of England’s history, every time the English thought they had solved the Irish Question, the Irish changed the Question. Something similar afflicts David Cameron’s grapplings with the Scottish Question. The poor man is damned if he does and equally damned if he doesn’t. The other week
There’s not much the Cabinet can do about accusations by the SNP that today’s visit to Aberdeen is a typical Westminster attempt to bully Scots by flying up to make yet another tranche of negative announcements about the consequences of independence, focusing this time on North Sea oil. If Cabinet ministers didn’t make this trip,