Liberal democrats

Earlier this year Mr S revealed how plans for a set of campaign posters for the Conservative candidate Flick Drummond had to be revised after the Tories realised that from a distance the poster could be misread as another word starting with F. Now Matthew Hancock has fallen victim to an unforeseeable error in his own campaign literature. A Lib Dem supporter has noticed an unfortunate fault that occurs on folding the Tory MP’s campaign leaflet: Mr S hopes no one gets the wrong idea.

What do the next generation of MPs think with regards to public services, government spending and taxes? Coffee House has got its hands on new research by Ipsos MORI on the opinions of prospective parliamentary candidates from the main parties. The pollsters interviewed almost one hundred PPCs – 26 Conservative, 29 Labour, 20 Liberal Democrat and 11 SNP – who are all standing in marginal or safe seats, and therefore stand a good chance of making it to the green benches after the general election. Here are the points that stand out: 1: Defence cuts on the front line Defence cuts lead the way for both Labour and Liberal Democrat candidates who

“I’ve got it too,” said David Cameron, whipping out the ‘contract with Britain’ he published five years ago. His team seems have prepared him for the format of Evan Davis’s BBC interviews: confront the subject with discomfiting material, probe a bit and see what happens. But he was less prepared for being challenged from the right.  Davis asked him on his failure to commit to the basic Nato minimum of spending 2pc of GDP on defence – in spite of his badgering other countries to do so at the Nato summit in Wales. “I don’t think that you’re willing to say Britain will stick to its international obligation on defence,” he said. “We’re keeping it clearly

Last week, the Greens released ‘Change the Tune’, a party political broadcast on YouTube. It features actors playing Cameron, Clegg, Miliband and Farage all singing in harmony. All four men are indistinguishable from one another. Ukip and the Lib Dems are the same, went the message. Only the Greens are different. Met with wild adulation from Green supporters and bewildered scepticism from more-or-less everyone else, the video has been the most high profile video of the campaign so far. Buckle up – it’s time for viral politics. YouTube and other platforms hosting political videos side-by-side with popular culture will play a significant role in this election. This is not particularly controversial. Political videos are

Nick Clegg produced Lib Dem red lines for any coalition with either Labour or the Tories in an interview with Evan Davis this evening. Clegg said that he wouldn’t go into Coalition with the Tories if they insisted on making £12 billion of cuts to welfare in the next two years. But he said that he also couldn’t recommend going into coalition with Labour until they were clearer about how they planned to deal with the deficit, making clear that what Labour said today was not sufficient. As Fraser says, this was an assured performance from Clegg who offered a robust defence of the government’s record. The Liberal Democrats would

David Cameron’s new Inheritance tax policy is clearly an important political message of aspiration and family values rather than a policy that will either help many or actually have much fiscal impact. The OBR has numbers on death rates and estates subject to the tax: just under 600,000 people died in 2013/14 and only 5 per cent of those had estates that were liable to inheritance tax. So that is just over 26,000 deaths in one year whose estates paid inheritance tax. According to the Telegraph, Cameron’s policy would only begin in 2017, two years into the next parliament. So three years of this policy and on 2013/14 rates this

According to a recent Ashcroft poll, Nick Clegg is on course to lose his seat in the general election. If he is ousted from Sheffield Hallam, the Deputy Prime Minister will follow in the footsteps of the Liberal leaders Archibald Sinclair and Herbert Samuel, who both lost their seats while leading the party. Clegg is of course keen to make sure history doesn’t repeat itself. So keen in fact, that Steerpike can now reveal the desperate lengths the Liberal Democrats leader has gone to in his fight to keep Labour from taking his seat. According to the latest register of interests, Clegg has taken a total of £50,000 in donations since mid-March. In his hour of need, Clegg

In a close campaign, you would normally expect the smaller parties to get squeezed as voters decided that is really a choice between Labour and the Tories. But this time, thing might be different. Why, because the general expectation is that there will be another hung parliament and the coverage of the campaign is being reflected through that prism. This emphasis on the likelihood of a hung parliament could change how people actually vote. As I write in the current issue of the magazine, the British Election Study shows that among voters who expect another hung parliament support for both Labour and the Tories is radically lower with the minor

Mock Nick Clegg all you like, but he is taking an impressively pragmatic approach to this General Election. The Deputy Prime Minister knows that he might not get as much coverage as the main parties or the insurgent parties if he just says things (though already announcing a lot of your manifesto and charging hacks £750 a day for the pleasure of hanging out in your disturbingly Austin Powers-esque bus might make that a tad more difficult anyway). So to ensure that he does get a modicum of coverage each day, he’s having a picture caption election. On Monday, it was hedgehogs in Solihull. Yesterday he had that selfie with Joey

Ed Miliband’s so-called ‘Paxo bounce’ in the opinion polls is ebbing away. The polls out this evening have the Conservatives either level pegging with Labour or slightly ahead. Tonight’s latest from YouGov/The Sun has both parties neck and neck, with the Conservatives and Labour on 35 per cent — a three point rise for the Tories on Sunday — while Ukip is on 12 per cent, the Lib Dems on eight and the Greens on five. In his weekly national poll, Lord Ashcroft has the Tories two points ahead on 36 per cent, up three points from last week. The Tory pollster has Labour on 34 per cent, Ukip on ten, the Lib Dems