Labour party

Thursday

Alex Massie

Immigration: The BNP are Winning and Britain is Losing

One of the odder aspects of contemporary politics is the amount of attention lavished upon the goons at the BNP. Anyone would think they were about to win the election. But they’re not. Nevertheless, grant Nick Griffin and his pals this: they’ve managed to hijack the debate – such as it is – on immigration. Despite what the media might have you think, there is no party of open borders in this country. Instead both the Tories and the Labour party effectively concede the argument to the BNP. Labour boast that they have immigration “under control” and then the Tories complain that the government isn’t “cracking down” hard enough. The

Peter Hoskin

Brown v Blair: a comedy

First the tragedy, then the farce: if there was something dark, perhaps shocking, about last weekend’s bullying allegations, then the latest Rawnsley revelations veer towards the hilarious.  They’re centred around Brown’s efforts to oust Tony Blair, and the Guardian covers them here.  I won’t pre-empt your enjoyment of them, except to highlight this passage from the report: “Rawnsley reveals that Brown rang Blair while he was staying with the Queen at Balmoral. He was furious that Alan Milburn, Blair’s close ally, had written a piece supporting the prime minister’s right to stay at No 10. Rawnsley writes: ‘The chancellor’s fury was titanically demented even by his standards. ‘You put fucking

Peter Hoskin

Back with a vengeance | 25 February 2010

All of a sudden, the Big Banks are Big Politics again.  And who’d have it any other way, on the day that the 84 percent taxpayer-owned RBS announced losses for 2009 of £3.6 billion?  And that’s alongside a bonus pool for its staff of £1.3 billion.  Yep – however hard they try, the exorcists of Westminster just can’t shift the ghost of Fred the Shred. In which case, there’ll be plenty about bankers’ pay, and about getting taxpayers what’s owed to them, over the next few days.  And rightly so.  But I often feel that these issues detract from even bigger ones, such as how to ensure that there aren’t

Wednesday

David Blackburn

Many BNP voters’ concerns are legitimate and should be recognised as such

Frank Field was characteristically forthright on the Today programme this morning. “I don’t believe, given the strains (on the economy), we will be able to maintain an open door policy without serious unrest on the streets,” he said, and this brings me to a Sunny Hundal article on the media’s approach to the BNP. Hundal is extremely eloquent but his premises are ill-conceived. He aligns the BNP exclusively with racism and immigration, because it follows that a racist is illegitimate and can be consigned to irrelevance. He writes: ‘If you want to vote BNP and think people of different cultures and races are scary, why not just say so? Every

David Blackburn

Ashcroft has unleashed hell in the marginals

Alistair Darling’s sudden and poetic ejaculation is sure evidence that the government is a rabble of warring tribes. Against such opponents, the Tories should win, and win big. Daniel Finkelstein is adamant that they still could. He states the obvious: polls are general and do not account for specifics in key marginals. In-built boundary bias created the assumption that Cameron needs an 11 percent swing to win a majority of one. Finkelstein rubbishes that thesis; parties that win by 11 points win landslides: ‘In 1997 Mr Blair’s Labour built a new coalition, winning support across social classes. They therefore won in suburbs and prosperous towns that had always voted Tory

Peter Hoskin

Darling throws one hell of a spanner into No.10’s election works

So what’s Alistair Darling up to?  When I first heard his “forces of Hell” comment last night – his description of those briefing against him from inside No.10 – I half suspected it was all part of Downing Street’s grand plan.  You know, trying to defuse the bullying story by being honest – up to a point – about Brown’s premiership, and then claiming that everything’s alright really.  A bit like Peter Mandelson saying he took his “medicine like a man” – only with greater poetic license. Now, though, I’m convinced that this wasn’t part of No.10’s script.  The clue is in the hurried, and ridiculous, denials that have been

Tuesday

David Blackburn

David Miliband would set the people free

What is it about the Blairite passion for abstract nouns? I ask, not out of facetiousness, but because I want to know what they mean by loose terms such as ‘empowerment’. David Miliband joins James Purnell among the progressive left’s thinkers who are reimagining the relationship between state and citizen, and he gave a concept heavy, substance light speech to Demos this afternoon. I’ve read it a couple of times and can’t get my head round it. Peering through the glass darkly, the central concept is attractive: Miliband wants to give more power to the people. Some valid policies season his argument. For instance, the 1 week cancer pledge would

Peter Hoskin

Brown comes around to the Mandelson way of thinking

Did I read it wrong, or did Brown really say this in his interview with the Economist? “[Our deficit-reduction plan] is probably the most ambitious of any of the G7 countries. It contains, obviously, public-spending economies, cuts in some departments, efficiency savings in others, but protection of the front-line services in health and education and policing. It contains tax rises … I wish we hadn’t had to do that but … it is necessary to show that you have got a sensible and credible plan over a number of years…” Putting aside the question of whether it really is the most ambitious deficit plan in the G7 (other countries want

Peter Hoskin

How not to calm the bullying row

Phil Woolas, the immigration minister, probably thought he was being helpful to Gordon Brown by describing Christine Pratt as: “this prat of a woman down in – where’s she from, Swindon?” But, erm, he wasn’t.

Peter Hoskin

Terror on Downing St: The Movie<br />

You think you’ve seen everything, and then Dizzy goes and unearths this Taiwanese news report about Brown and the bullying allegations. The computer dramatisations, from the 35 second mark on, are simply jaw-dropping:

David Blackburn

Brown the victim

As Pete points out, the longer the bullying story runs the more chance there is that the public sympathise with Brown, as they did over the Jacqui Janes story. Now Ed Balls is playing the sympathy card for his mentor, saying that Brown has been deeply hurt by these false allegations. Whatever next? Damian McBride breaks his retreat in a seminary and says: “Brown’s the loveliest man I’ve met, never hurt a fly guv, honest.” The preposterous and the distasteful hang above this latest twist, but Downing Street’s spin operation remains terrifyingly focussed. Yesterday saw the destruction of Christine Pratt’s credibility – she didn’t deserve such a barracking but most

Peter Hoskin

The bullying story keeps on rolling, but will it affect the polls?

Much confusion on the digital grapevine, last night, about YouGov’s latest daily tracker poll.  Turns out, it doesn’t have the Tories leading by twelve – but, rather, the positions are unchanged from the poll in the Sunday Times.  So that’s the Tories on 39 percent, Labour on 33, and the Lib Dems on 17.  A six point gap between the two main parties. The poll was conducted between Sunday afternoon and Monday morning – so, after the bullying story broke, but, perhaps, too soon for it to have filtered through to the public consciousness.  Even so, Labour will be encouraged by what they see.  A below-headline question has more people

Monday

David Blackburn

Not a day to be a Pratt

The unfortunately named Christine Pratt, her husband and the National Bullying Helpline have been completely demolished by one of the most well co-ordinated spin operations I can recall. The charity’s accounts bear no examination. Two Patrons, Cary Cooper and Mary O’Connor, have resigned – disgusted that Pratt broke the charity’s commitment to confidentiality, as indeed was Ann Widdecombe. The Charities Commission have been called in. She’s flip-flopped on her original claims at least twice: initially suggesting that Gordon Brown was a bully, then insisting he wasn’t and then recalling that he possibly might have been. Plainly, her memory of who calls her and what they say is as leaky as

David Blackburn

Rawnsley’s indictment of the entire Brown government is lost amid a smokescreen about bullying

Ministers are a fickle bunch. It is striking how many have come out in support of Gordon Brown today; they were much more bashful on the afternoon of the Snow Plot. The government has been galvanised and today is a rare glimpse of what a truly united government might resemble. Cynics would intimate that this sudden cohesion validates Rawnsley’s observations, not only about Brown’s swivelled-eyed rages but also his government’s immediate descent into faction after the election that never was. I’m with the cynics. Rawnsley’s more sensational exposes have masked the narrative of disintegration. It is this – as much as the fact that Labour installed unopposed into office an

Daniel Korski

A Cameron-Clegg government

With even Michael Portillo predicting a hung parliament, what would Britain’s post-election government actually look like if the Tories did not secure an over-all majority.   The Tories could form a minority government, hoping to persuade enough MPs from other parties, but principally the Liberal Democrats, to vote with them on the key issues. Such a government would be inherently unstable, lurching from vote to vote and dependent on the relationship between a Prime Minister Cameron and Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, as well as between George Osborne, the would-be Chancellor, and Vince Cable, who many think is a more qualified potential occupant of No 11. Party leaders would

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Some reasons to be cheerful about Cameron and the Tories

By way of a response to the comments on my post yesterday, here are some reasons to be cheerful about Cameron and the Tories. The poll lead dropping to six points is indeed a wake-up call, and Cameron probably worked out a while ago that things were going a bit Pete Tong. Indeed (Short the UK), there are signs that he has already started to act. Look at last Monday: three strong election videos, without a politician in sight. The perfect remedy to the Tragedy of Cameron’s Head poster. The policy of allowing management buy-outs of government departments is bold, radical and entirely in keeping with Cameron’s general policy of

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Cameron’s first response to the bullying question

Cameron just got the question on Brown and bullying. His reply was well pitched, right tone of voice and all that. But it contained the suggestion that Sir Phillip Mawer, who polices the ministerial code, should be asked to investigate. This is the last thing No 10 wants, it just wants this to go away. But I suspect Cameron has just given the story a nudge along.

David Blackburn

How should the Tories respond to the Rawnsley allegations?

As James predicted last night, the ‘Bully boy Brown’ story is now at full steam and will speed on as phone-ins discuss bullying in the workplace. The National Bullying Helpline’s intervention, ethically dubious in view of the charity’s supposed confidentiality, has negated Labour’s damage limitation strategy. Both Peter Mandelson’s line that Brown is a passionate and demanding man and the PR campaign to soften Brown’s image have been blown clear out of the water. Brown has made significant progress recently: David Cameron’s personal ratings have halved since September. That brief resurgence will be reversed as this story rolls. The Sun’s hot-headed frontpage says it all.   Now is the time

Sunday

Fraser Nelson

Time for Cameron’s Lazarus act

Two seriously worrying polls for the Conservatives today. One is a Sunday Times/YouGov poll, showing a Labour recovery reducing the Tory lead to six points  well into hung parliament territory and the lowest since December 2008. The other is a PoliticsHome poll in the News of the World, according to which: Cameron’s approval rate has been steadily falling, and Brown’s similtaneously rising – the difference between them has halved, in recent months, from 90 points to 45 points. If the election is a 39-33 split, then the Tories end up with just ten more seats than Labour and are dependent on coalition with the LibDems. A result like this, against

Saturday

Peter Hoskin

Brown faces the Rawnsley revelations, while the Tories face the polls

The question tonight is: which piece of bad news will make the biggest impact?  The bad news for the Tories, or the bad news for Labour? Let’s take the second one first.  I’m referring, of course, to the first installment in Andrew Rawnsley’s revelations about Gordon Brown.  ConHome have already published some snippets – click here – and they give you plenty of juice for your buck.  Not only are there the expected allegations about Brown hitting his staff (much of which seems to have been covered in the Mail on Sunday a couple of weeks ago), but Rawsley also reveals that the Cabinet Secretary, Gus O’Donnell, investigated and reprimanded