Labour party

It’s only ten days or so since Ed Balls was last quizzed by Andrew Neil, but there he was rehashing many of the same lines on the Sunday Politics today. Among the things that stood out was this: the shadow chancellor’s argument on the public finances is ever more cleaving into two halves. First, he accuses George Osborne of borrowing £150 billion more over this Parliament than originally planned. (Although there’s a detail that often, conveniently, gets obscured: namely, that borrowing is still going down year-on-year under Osborne’s plan). Second, that Balls’s plan would decrease borrowing in the medium-term even though it would increase spending and reduce tax revenues in

As the dust settles on these elections, it is becoming clearer how the parties did. Labour exceeded expectations, the Tories had a bad but not disastrous set of results and the Liberal Democrats took another kicking. Indeed, they actually lost a higher proportion of the seats that they were defending this year than they did last year: 44 per cent compared to 41 per cent in 2011. Given these results is it is quite remarkable how solidly behind Nick Clegg the Lib Dem parliamentary party remains. Not a single MP has called for him to go or for the party to quit coalition. I’m sure this is partly because the

The results so far have been good but not spectacular for Labour. The BBC’s national vote share projection has them on 39 percent, the Tories on 31, and the Lib Dems on 16. These numbers would deliver a comfortable Labour majority on both the old and new boundaries. Strikingly, UKIP is averaging 14 percent in the wards it is standing in. This is an impressive result given that UKIP traditionally doesn’t do that well in local elections where Europe is less of an issue. I suspect that the result is a combination of the fact that the party’s agenda has widened beyond Europe in recent years, that the coalition has

Yep, they’re inescapable, those Lib Dems. Even when the airwaves are dominated by Rupert Murdoch and Tom Watson, they’re there in the background, quietly adding to the day’s pile of political news. We’ve got Ken Livingstone making a pitch for their votes in the London Mayor’s contest, for instance. And we’ve also got Nick Clegg on what seems like every radio show on air, giving his account of why folk should be Lib Dem voters in the first place. There have been two more significant scraps of LibDemmery than those, though. The first came in one of Clegg’s radio appearances, when he said that he isn’t ‘hung up’ on who

With unionists getting grubbed in Scotland and Labour being driven to near-extinction in vast swathes of the south, a new map of political Britain is emerging. In my latest Telegraph column, I called it ‘Tricolour Britain’ — the SNP at the top, Tories at the bottom and Labour stuck in the middle (with Wales). Policy Exchange has today released research which throws more light on this slow-mo political segregation. I thought CoffeeHousers may be interested in what strike me as the top points.   1. Scottish Tory Syndrome is when a once-dominant party loses and doesn’t recover. The party has failed to capture the imagination of voters, so when its apparatus

The Conservatives get a battering in tomorrow’s papers. Jeremy Hunt graces the front pages of the Observer and the Indy. The Sunday Express has an Angus Reid poll that finds 82 per cent of ordinary voters think the coalition is out of touch. The Mail on Sunday has given space for Ed Miliband to attack David Cameron. And Boris has told the Sunday Telegraph that now is the time for more tax cuts (he also refers to George Osborne as ‘the jaws of death’). Needless to say, Boris is bucking the national trend – still the favourite to win London, although it’s bound to be close. The paper also covers