Labour party

Tuesday

Philip Cowley

Numbers, not arguments about legitimacy, will decide who enters No.10 after May 7

Lyndon Johnson’s first lesson of politics was to be able to count. It’s something that many of those commenting on the various post-election scenarios could do with remembering. Let’s start with those who think that there is some overriding importance in being the largest single party and that this gives you the right to form a government, even if you lack a majority. It is never clear what people expect the other parties to do in such a scenario. Assume, for example, that after the election the Conservatives are the largest party but without a majority, and there is an anti-Conservative block that is larger. Do we really expect the

Sebastian Payne

Election podcast special: nine days to go

In today’s election podcast special, Fraser Nelson, James Forsyth, Isabel Hardman and I discuss David Cameron’s ramped up rhetoric on the SNP threat to the Union, the Tories’ promise to create 50,000 new apprenticeships from Libor fines and Labour’s latest attempts to talk about controlling immigration. We also briefly look at the Liberal Democrats ‘red lines’ for future coalition negotiations and Ukip’s attempts to woo voters in the north. You can subscribe to the View from 22 through iTunes and have it delivered to your computer or iPhone every week, or you can use the player below:

Steerpike Steerpike

Why would Ed Miliband even want to woo Russell Brand?

The Sun reports this morning that Ed Miliband recently made a late-night visit to Russell Brand’s £2 million home. Details on what was discussed remain unknown, although Labour has now confirmed that rather than Miliband’s own François Hollande moment, or a pre-emptive mansion tax inspection, it was in fact an interview. A friend of mine lives opposite Russell Brand and snapped this picture of Ed Milliband leaving his house…urm pic.twitter.com/kHGVWFbpVZ — Elisa Misu Solaris (@ElisaMisu) April 27, 2015 However, if Miliband is to appear in an episode of Brand’s online show The Trews, it’s unclear what the Labour leader hopes to gain from it. Is this really an endorsement any serious potential Prime Minister would want?

Louis Reynolds

Rural people have been let down by both Labour and the Conservatives

In 1997, Labour could assert with a straight face that it was ‘the party of the countryside’, because it genuinely competed with the Tories for rural votes. Today, an electoral map of England is a sea of blue rural constituencies dotted with clusters of urban red. Looking forward to May, the latest polls have the two main parties neck and neck, with the Tories on 34 per cent and Labour one point behind. This reflects an unhealthy urban-rural political divide that has rarely been more extreme. Labour is as unlikely to make in-roads into rural Conservative heartlands as the Tories are to win large numbers of seats in northern urban seats, making a clear victory

Monday

Sebastian Payne

Tories six points ahead in new Ashcroft poll and three points ahead according to ICM

Two new polls out today have the Tories ahead. Lord Ashcroft’s latest national poll says the Conservatives currently have a six point lead at per cent — up two points from last week — while Labour remains on 30 per cent. Ashcroft has Ukip down slightly to 11 per cent and the Liberal Democrats are on nine per cent. The Guardian/ICM also put the Tories ahead in their new poll today, putting the Conservatives on 35 per cent and Labour on 32 per cent. It’s worth noting that both the Ashcroft and ICM polls were conducted by telephone. There are two other polls out today, conducted online, which show the

Sebastian Payne

Election podcast special: 10 days to go

The general election campaign has entered the final stretch and each day between now and polling day, we’ll be producing a short lunchtime podcast looking at the day’s campaign developments. Today, Fraser Nelson, James Forsyth, Isabel Hardman and I discuss Labour’s new housing pledges, the 5,000 small businesses backing the Tories, the hysterical talk of the SNP threat — as well as the unfathomable state of the opinion polls. You can subscribe to the View from 22 through iTunes and have it delivered to your computer or iPhone every week, or you can use the player below:

Steerpike Steerpike

Tristram Hunt: I am hugely in favour of yummy mummies

After Gordon Brown was famously forced by Mumsnet members to reveal his favourite biscuit, Mr S was intrigued to see that Tristram Hunt had agreed to a Mumsnet chat of his own this lunchtime. Brown was so thrown by the chat back in 2009 that he had to take a 24-hour break after he was asked 12 times to name his favourite biscuit. Hunt seems to have held his nerve better. The chat began above board, with parents asking Hunt what he would do to ensure teachers stay in the profession. He promised to ‘cut down on the bureaucracy getting in the way of teaching’ in order to guarantee that teachers ‘regain their love of the job’.

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Note from Mandelson’s firm warns that SNP will drag Labour to the left

Peter Mandelson and Ed Miliband appeared to have been undergoing a certain rapprochement during this campaign. Mandelson declared recently that Miliband has ‘way exceeded my expectations‘. But a briefing note from Global Counsel, of which Mandelson is chairman, is bound to be seized on by the Tories. The note is entitled ‘Why the SNP will win whatever happens on May 7th’ and goes on to discuss what might happen if the Nationalists end up holding the balance of power in a hung parliament. It warns that ‘English dissatisfaction is likely to grow over time with the consequences of Labour government being sustained in power by the SNP’. It also predicts

Sebastian Payne

Campaign kick-off: 10 days to go

With just under two weeks to go until polling day, the promises, threats and reassurances will kick up a notch as we enter the final stretch of the campaign. The Tories have another 5,000 businesses to back up their case for reelection, while Labour is turning to its favourite weapon of market intervention towards housing. To help guide you through the melée of stories and spin, here is a summary of today’s main election stories. 1. Building for Britain The Tories have tried to paint themselves as the party of home ownership throughout this campaign. But Labour is attempting to seize that mantle with several new policies on housing today.

Sunday

James Forsyth

This election will be decided by the undecideds

The polls could hardly be closer than they are at the moment and the parliamentary arithmetic looks like it is going to be remarkably tight, there’ll be only a few seats in it as to whether it’ll be Cameron or Miliband as Prime Minister. Yet, campaign aides on both sides have been struck by one thing: the large number of undecideds. One recent poll suggested that as many as one in five of those who intend to vote are still undecided. How this group breaks will determine the result. As one close Miliband ally put it to me, ‘The defining moment of this campaign hasn’t happened yet’. The Tory hope

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Miliband avoids the Scottish question

On the Andrew Marr show this morning, Ed Miliband fended off questions about any post-election deal with the Scottish National Party. He had two lines of defence. First, he said he wasn’t going to pre-empt the election result and that he was fighting to win the election everywhere including Scotland. Second, he was adamant that ‘I’m not doing deals with the Scottish National Party’. But there was no explanation of how he would pilot legislation through the Commons without their support. listen to ‘Ed Miliband on the Andrew Marr Show’ on audioBoom When it came to the economy, Miliband refused to admit that the last Labour government spent too much,

Friday

Sebastian Payne

Who is rallying behind Ed Miliband: the undecided voters or Labour supporters?

As polling day nears, everyone is trying to work out which way undecided voters will break. Contrary to what many predicted, Labour and Ed Miliband have had a pretty decent short campaign, although this hasn’t yet led to a polling lead. But the key question is whether Miliband is winning support from the undecided voters. A recent poll from ComRes showed that the Labour leader isn’t viewed particularly well among this group. 28 per cent said they would want to see David Cameron run the country, compared to 16 per cent for Ed Miliband. This isn’t much of a change since before the campaign began. In March, 12 per cent of undecided voters said they would

Steerpike Steerpike

Has the BBC painted its website red?

Dare Mr S suggest the BBC election website is a little skewed towards the red corner? Miliband’s foreign policy foray leads the hub, yet fails to give much coverage of the fact that his ‘attack’ has been criticised from all sides. Of all the top stories, only one could be construed as vaguely supportive of the Tories, while a call from a minor Welsh nationalist to organise an ‘anti-Tory’ coalition is considered more important by the editors than the launch of the first-ever English manifesto by David Cameron and William Hague. And one does wonder why ‘the abuse case’ peer’s party allegiances are not deemed headline worthy? For the record, he’s Labour…

John O'Neill

Have the Tories given up on taking seats from Labour?

David Cameron and George Osborne’s campaigning is focused on seats the Tory party wants to hold onto, while Ed Miliband is taking the fight to seats Labour wants to win from them. That’s the view in Labour HQ, and they’ve got figures to back it up: Since 30 March, when the ‘short campaign’ began, Cameron and Osborne have made 61 campaign visits between them, Labour says. More than half have been to Tory-held seats, many of them on the ‘40/40’ list of seats that the Tories need to keep and win in order to end up with a majority. Here’s where they’ve been: Ed Miliband and Ed Balls, Labour says,

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Do Labour voters hate the SNP enough to save the Lib Dems?

For someone who might be about to lose her seat, Jo Swinson seems very perky as she walks the streets of Bishopbriggs in her constituency. The Lib Dem, who is standing for re-election in East Dunbartonshire in Scotland, is busy trying to persuade people who have received their postal votes this week to back her. The weather is sunny and warm and the Business and Equalities Minister cheerful, but the outlook isn’t quite so good when you take a glance at the numbers. A poll by Lord Ashcroft last week put the SNP on 40 per cent, with Swinson trailing behind on 29 per cent. That’s a 19.5 per cent

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters | 23 April 2015

Enemies within Sir: I thought Matthew Parris was typically incisive in his last column, but perhaps not quite as much as the person who wrote its online headline, ‘Scotland knows the power of a common enemy. We English don’t’ (18 April). It is true that ‘the wish to be the underdog’ is a defining urge of our age, even in relatively prosperous polities such as Scotland and Catalonia. But Parris is wrong when he claims that the closest the English come to the ‘Braveheart feeling’ is in their collective memory of the second world war. If only that were true. Would any other country make so little of its crucial

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 23 April 2015

Home The prospect of a parliamentary alliance between Labour and the Scottish National Party injected an element of fear into the election campaign. The SNP manifesto promised to increase spending and to find a way to stop the renewal of the Trident nuclear deterrent. Nicola Sturgeon, the SNP leader, said she wanted to make Labour in government ‘bolder and better’. Lord Forsyth, a former Conservative Scottish secretary, said that the building up of the SNP, to take seats in Scotland, was a ‘dangerous view which threatens the integrity of our country’. Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, said the Tories should not be ‘talking up’ the SNP. Even the Democratic Unionists

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Tristram Hunt: Education Secretaries can send their kids private

In the Daily Politics education debate just now on the BBC, Tristram Hunt declared that it was acceptable for an Education Secretary to send their own child to private school. Under questioning from Andrew Neil, Hunt said that it was fine in ‘certain circumstances.’ The other members of the panel—including Nicky Morgan and David Laws—then agreed with Hunt’s statement. Is it acceptable for an education secretary to send their child to a private school @afneil asks his #bbcdp panel? https://t.co/A5VI9mnHlz — DailySunday Politics (@daily_politics) April 23, 2015 Hunt’s remarks are politically brave. Those on the hard left will take issue with his statement as they did with Ruth Kelly, who

Jennifer Williams

The Conservatives are strategising regional media out of the grid – and it won’t help their cause

This has, I think we can all agree, been the most stage-managed election ever. Nobody on a soap box, no punches thrown, no bigoted women. Just a seamless marathon of national messaging that starts with the Today programme and ends with Newsnight. It is the regional media, however, that feels the iron grip of the parties’ media machines the most. We work where voters actually live. So how we are treated during political visits can be revealing. And Labour, most regional reporters seem to agree, seem to have chilled out. Ed Miliband and other senior Labour figures are freely giving up their time. We do get asked what sort of

John O'Neill

Four things you need to know about the IFS’ manifesto analysis

Nobody’s perfect, are they? The IFS found something to criticise today for all the parties — the Conservatives, Labour, Lib Dems and SNP — whose tax and spending plans it has examined. The main charges are of leaving questions about spending and borrowing unanswered: The Conservatives ‘have not been completely explicit about exactly what level of borrowing they would want to achieve’ and nor have the SNP, Labour has ‘provided disappointingly little information on what they would borrow’. There’s a gold star for the back of the Lib Dems’ exercise book: they have been ‘more transparent’ about their fiscal plans than other parties, but they get a rap on the knuckles too for saying that ‘largely unspecified’ anti-tax