All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
As the Liberal Democrat leadership leaves Birmingham, it is a contented bunch. Their conference has gone as well as could be expected. There were no embarrassing defeats for the leadership and no gaffes by any of their ministers. But conference was yet another reminder of how much of a gap there is between where those
Nick Clegg’s speech will be remembered for its visceral attack on Labour. But it was remarkable for other reasons, notably for what he neglected to say. Clegg said next to nothing about his government’s flagship education and welfare reforms. Only the increase in the pupil premium budget received a mention, as did the new ambition
Listening to Nick Clegg’s speech today, there was little doubt which party he’d rather be in coalition with. There were some coded slights at the Tories’ expense—the emphasis on how the Lib Dems had been ‘fighting to keep the NHS safe’ and his commitment that the Human Rights Act was here to stay—but they were
At the beginning of the conference season I mused on Twitter that these occasions were very tribal, but that I had never been able to work out what defined the Liberal Democrat tribe. I was bombarded by suggestions. Iain Martin bluntly wrote: “What is the Lib Dem tribe? Answer: A lot smaller than it used
Peter Suderman says Rick Perry’s “epic new campaign ad appears to have been shot by Michael Bay and edited by Tony Scott in Domino-esque fit of ADHD frenzy” and, sure enough, that’s about right. But it’s kinda absurd and awesome too. I can’t wait to see Rowan Atkinson star in the Ed Miliband version… If
Clegg conf speech
When Nick Clegg speaks today, he can – as usual – rely on a good deal of support from those in the hall. According to YouGov, current Lib Dem supporters support him by a 2-to-1 margin. That’s stronger approval than Miliband gets from Labour voters, although nowhere near the popularity David Cameron enjoys with his
The Lib Dems have just had a brief Q&A on foreign affairs. Paddy Ashdown and defence minister Nick Harvey gave staunch their support to the Afghan Mission, but confessed to having misgivings. Ashdown described the Bush administration’s strategy as an “absolute model of how not to intervene, both militarily and politically”. This failure, Ashdown said,
It’s time for Britain to leave the European Union. That was the motion at last night’s Spectator debate. Rod Liddle officiated between the two sides, with Christopher Booker and Daniel Hannan supporting the motion and Denis MacShane and Phillip Sousta against. You can read Lloyd Evans’ exclusive report of the evening’s proceedings here.
Listen to John Prescott on the Today programme this morning and you may begin to understand the complexity of the task Labour faces. Prescott was putting the best gloss he could on Labour and the vastly incompetent civil service wasting hundreds of millions on regional fire stations. Listening to his bluster, even the most loyal
Nick Clegg will deliver his keynote speech to the Liberal Democrat conference later this afternoon. It has been substantially trailed this morning, despite competing for airtime with Nick Robinson’s story about the injection of an extra £5 billion of capital spending into the economy. Similarly to Monday’s Q&A with activists, Clegg is expected to defend
Strange things are happening between Whitehall and Birmingham. After the IMF downgraded its growth forecast for Britain yesterday, the BBC reported that some government were considering spending an additional £5bn on capital projects: transport links, broadband, housing and so forth: as a stimulus to ward off possible recession. The implication was that the Liberal Democrats
Responding to research that finds school-voucher lottery winners from poorly-performing school districts in North Carolina do much better than the beleaguered kids who don’t get a winning ticket, Matt Yglesias makes the vital point: Note that this is consistent with charter skeptics’ favorite research finding that, on average, public charter schools are about the same
I don’t know, just as you don’t know, whether Troy Davis is innocent. I do suspect that his conviction would, in this country, be considered unsafe. Not that this, or anything else, matters to the Georgia Board of Pardons who have denied Davis’s last appeal for clemency. No-one should be surprised by that. Nevertheless, the
I don’t think “squeezed middle” means what the lovely Mrs Odone thinks it means: For the past decade, our parental angst, which had my husband tossing and turning at night and me frantic about freelance work (I remember dashing out of hospital within three days of an emergency caesarian to write an article), could be
I’ve been away from Birmingham today but, even from a distance, it’s clear that Tim Farron has had a rather difficult day. It started with a story in The Times this morning about upset among his fellow MPs about his rhetoric on Sunday implying that the coalition partners would get divorced before 2015 and continued
Chris Huhne can always be guaranteed to grate. Several Conservatives have cracked wry smiles at the energy secretary’s comments about the “Tory Tea Party tendency”. Mark Pritchard quipped that plenty of senior Lib Dems would soon be at leisure to throw their own tea parties and John Redwood dismissed Huhne’s cant as conference high-jinks. Redwood
The row about which email account special advisers use for which emails is, I suspect, of very little interest to anyone outside SW1. But today’s FT story certainly has set the cat amongst the Whitehall pigeons. At the risk of trying the patience of everyone who doesn’t work within a mile of the Palace of Westminster,
Martin McGuinness’s campaign for the Irish Presidency is, of course, a disgusting affair. How could it ever be otherwise? But even by Sinn Fein’s grim standards, it’s off to a loathsome, disingenuous beginning. Speaking on Irish radio this morning, McGuinness complained that a coterie of “West Brits” in the Dublin media are out to get
Messy deals and fudged compromises: an inevitable feature of coalition politics. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the resulting policy will always be bad. As a result of grubby negotiations in Downing Street, it looks as if we might just end up with a change in direction of tax policy which should have been made years ago.
Chris Huhne’s tough guy act aside, the major event in Birmingham today was the Lib Dems’ NHS debate. When Andrew Lansley’s contentious NHS reforms were derailed earlier this year, Liberal Democrats claimed the credit and senior party strategists believe the leadership must carry on broadcasting that message at any and every opportunity. The party seems to agree.
Peter Bone MP: send them off!
Today we got the black comedy follow up to Sarah Teather’s stand-up routine. Chris Huhne is going to drive down our energy bills! For those of us wondering how families and businesses can afford his expensive climate policies, it is a bit of a joke. The basic issue – as I set out in the
If nothing else, this year’s Liberal Democrat conference has shown that many party members are content to lurch towards electoral disaster. Broadly speaking, the members seem happier with the Farron-Huhne-Harris view of the coalition as, at best, a necessary if uncomfortable evil than they do with the Clegg-Alexander-Laws belief that it’s a happy, virtuous thing.
Today’s Lib Dem attack on their coalition partners comes from Chris Huhne, who rails against a “Tea Party tendency” in Conservatives sceptical of the European Union. His premise is that those who are hostile to the EU are a minority. It’s worth digging a little deeper here, because the opposite is true. If you believe that
Gordon Brown notoriously sold British gold for $275 an ounce, costing Britain several billion. But has our subsequent decision not to buy gold also cost us dear? The Tory press office has had fun with gold’s rise, tweeting that it means Brown’s disastrous foray into asset management cost £12 billion. But as John Rentoul asked,
James wrote at the weekend, Nick Clegg’s Orange Book allies fear Tim Farron, the Lib Dem President and standard bearer of the social democrat wing of the party. Yesterday, Farron said that the coalition would “end in divorce” in the months running up to the next general election. That provocative comment followed the barnstorming speech that Farron
Communication, communication, communication: that appears to be Nick Clegg’s new political mantra. Speaking to the Today programme earlier this morning, the Lib Dem leader said: “If there is a legitimate criticism to be made of our government, it is that we haven’t articulated that there are things we can do”. He made the same point
Markets sank into negative territory this morning, following Standand&Poor’s downgrade of Italy’s credit rating. (Although they have since recovered.) The agency cut Italy’s rating from A+/A-1+ to A/A-1; it also kept its outlook as negative. The agency’s reasoning is hardly surprising: growth is negligible, debt is unsustainable and Silvio Berlusconi’s inert government appears incapable of
Some politician shouldn’t try stand-up comedy. Sarah Teather is one of those politicians.
One of the most striking things about Lib Dem conference has been how up for a scrap over Europe the party’s ministers are. Every single Lib Dem Cabinet minister has, over the past few days, ruled out any attempt to repatriate powers from Brussels. Given that the Conservative party wouldn’t forgive David Cameron not attempting
Writers of my generation are comparing the BBC’s version of Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy – the highpoint of the golden age of British television drama in my view – against the new film. You can see the 1979 series now because rather magnificently, if not perhaps legally, someone has put it on YouTube. The film,
The Telegraph’s splash on Europe indicates that the issue, which proved so toxic to the last Conservative government, has risen again. Writing a stern op-ed for the paper, serial rebel and anti-Cameroon Mark Pritchard calls for a referendum. This will have irritated Downing Street no end, which is understood to have hoped that the whip-sanctioned
This is the second of our occasional ‘another voice’ series. Siobhan Courtney reports again from Dale Farm. The outcome was not what anyone expected: the bailiffs are not getting into Dale Farm. The atmosphere here now is very different to that of the weekend, when I was able to see what life was like inside