Liberal democrats

Wednesday

James Forsyth

Jokes and jibes follow the ‘gracious speech’

The Queen’s Speech debate is a unique mix of parliamentary variety show and proper politics. The debate was opened by Nadhim Zahawi — who combined humour with some serious points to good effect — and Malcolm Bruce, who gave a rather worthy speech. Ed Miliband then kicked off the more political part of proceedings. Miliband, who no longer has a kick-me sign attached to him when he gets up to the despatch box, is clearly still exulting in the local election results. He scored the best hit of the debate when he complimented Zahawi on his speech. Noting that the Tory MP was the co-founder of YouGov, Miliband joked ‘I’ve

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Today in Blundering: Government Relaunches Always Fail

A government relaunch of the sort we’ve endured this week is inevitably a fraught, fragile affair. The problem with such enterprises is that they have this unfortunate habit of drawing attention to the fact that it is, well, a relaunch. Downing Street may hope differently but a relaunch inevitably draws attention to the very failures the relaunch is supposed to put behind us. You wouldn’t be doing this if things were going well, would you Prime Minister?  Of course things are not going well. Nor will they get any better any time soon. Yesterday’s Essex reprise of the chummy Downing Street coalition presser was a mistake. A necessary or at

James Forsyth James Forsyth

First blood to the sceptics on Lords reform

The Queen’s Speech commitment that ‘A Bill will be brought forward to reform the composition of the House of Lords’ is a lot vaguer than theLiberal Democrats were hoping for, or expected just a month or two ago. Crucially, there is no mention of the second chamber being elected. If this was not enough, the bill’s place in the speech — it was the 16th piece of legislation mentioned — sent out the signal that it is not a government priority. It appears that the Tory sceptics of Lords reform have won the opening battle. This impression is bolstered by the fact that leading Tory opponents of Lords reform are content

Peter Hoskin

Cameron tries to reassure his backbenchers ahead of the Queen’s Speech

The newspapers are awash with articles previewing today’s Queen’s Speech, but few stand out as much as James Chapman’s interview with David Cameron in the Daily Mail. Here, Cameron does something that he rarely does: complain about life with the Lib Dems. There was that one time when he claimed the Tories would be ‘making further steps’ on welfare and immigration were they in a majority government, of course — but this goes further than that. He tells the paper, ‘There is a growing list of things that I want to do but can’t.’ As for the specific items on that list, Cameron mentions ECHR reform, employment regulation and the

Sunday

Peter Hoskin

Whatever they say, Lords reform will remain on politcians’ minds

Have our politicos looked at last week’s turnout numbers, and thought ‘y’know, we might be a bit cut-off after all’? Reason I ask is because they’re all tripping over themselves today to downplay the significance of Lords reform, and focus the conversation on The Issues That Actually Matter. This, as James said earlier, is what George Osborne has been up to throughout the day. Ed Balls did likewise during an appearance on the Sunday Politics with Andrew Neil. And, most significantly, even Vince Cable echoed their sentiments in his interview on Sky’s Murnaghan Show. ‘We need to just quickly and quietly get on with this,’ he said of reforming the

Saturday

Fraser Nelson

It’s time to lurch towards the public

Much of the post-Boris analysis in today’s press features on whether a rightwards shift is appropriate. The Daily Mail calls for a return to Tory values, while Matthew Parris in The Times says such calls are predictable and meaningless. But, to me, talk about moving to the right or the left is pretty pointless. As the Telegraph says in its leader today, what’s needed isn’t a lurch to the right, but a lurch towards the public. This comes back to the great, eternally-relevant distinction that Keith Joseph made between the ‘middle ground’ between political parties, and the ‘common ground’ between a party and the public.   The problem with what

James Forsyth James Forsyth

How the parties fared

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

Friday

Hamish Macdonell

Labour succeeds in slowing Salmond’s advance

This was the election which was supposed to establish the SNP as Scotland’s new national party, replacing Labour as the default party of choice for Scottish voters. This was also the election which was expected show that last year’s extraordinary Scottish Parliament result was not a one-off and that the SNP could push on and defeat Labour in its town hall heartlands too. But none of this has happened. Not all the results are in from Scotland’s councils yet but the overall picture is already clear. Labour has recovered from last year’s Scottish Parliament shocker and halted the SNP momentum — at least in its core key urban areas of

Peter Hoskin

The Lib Dems are having a bad day too

We’ve heard about those disgruntled Tories, but what about the Lib Dems? After all, the local elections always used to be their psychic salve: they may have struggled to make much progress in general elections, but their fierce local activism could always be counted on to yield council seats. But now that’s less reliable a tonic. After today the party is going to have fewer than 3,000 councillors for the first time since the it was formed in 1988, losing overall control of Cambridge in the process There’s even talk that Brian Paddick will slump to fourth place, or possibly fifth, in the London Mayoral race. Of course, all this

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Where we stand this morning

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

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The early signs from the local elections

Tonight, there seems to be a general acceptance that Boris has won London. The talk is of a four points plus victory. But it is worth, of course, remembering that no votes have been counted and there’s been no exit poll. But, sadly, it appears that there will be few other mayoralties created this evening. The opposition of the local political establishment appears to have triumphed in nearly all the cities holding referendums on whether or not to have a mayor. Their loss is Liverpool’s gain which will benefit considerably if it is the largest city outside London with a mayor. In terms of the council results, the very early

Thursday

Jonathan Jones

15 (other) cities to watch

Forget London. Odds are that Boris will win re-election while Labour becomes the largest party on the GLA. There are far more exciting battles going on around the country. Here’s the state of play in 15 cities outside the M25: 1. Birmingham. After strong gains in 2011, Labour are looking to depose the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition and regain the overall majority they held here until 2003. They need just five gains to do so — and, with 18 Tory seats and 13 Lib Dem ones up, that shouldn’t prove too difficult. Both of the coalition parties are simply in damage limitation mode. 2. Glasgow. Labour held a majority here for

Tuesday

Peter Hoskin

The Lib Dems jostle for airtime

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

Monday

Fraser Nelson

Tricolour Britain

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

Friday

Peter Hoskin

The Lib Dems start to pile on Hunt

One of the key factors in this Jeremy Hunt business was always going to be the ferocity of the political maelstrom around him. After a slow start, the Tories have sought to calm it down, offering fulsome support for the embattled Culture Secretary. For their part, Labour have been calling for his resignation from the very moment the news broke, with Ed Miliband today accusing David Cameron of ‘organising a cover-up’ to protect his colleague. So far, so party lines. But what about the Lib Dems? It’s noteworthy that one of their number — Simon Hughes, natch — last night called for an independent investigation into the matter (see the

Peter Hoskin

Osborne’s turning point

As Paul Goodman suggests, there is something significant about Liam Fox’s article for the Daily Telegraph this morning. It’s not that we haven’t heard similar from the former Defence Secretary before — we have. It’s more that his economic prescriptions are being made, we learn from the Sun, with the ‘explicit approval’ of his buddy George Osborne. And what are those prescriptions? Well, the main one is for further spending cuts, and Fox also waxes enthusastic about greater deregulation and about protecting the defence budget (at the expense of international aid). He also has some firm advice for the Lib Dems. ‘They make up only one sixth — not one

Wednesday

Tuesday

James Forsyth

The Tories start to rally around Hunt

Since I wrote my earlier blog, I have been contacted by Tories who are supportive of Jeremy Hunt. One minister argued to me with eloquence and passion that Hunt was not someone who would do anything improper and that would become clear when he faced Leveson. Another Tory told me that ‘Hunt is an absolute star,’ and that it is crucial that he survives as he is one of Cameron’s more effective ministers. Most backbench Tory MPs I have spoken to this evening are supportive of Hunt. But, intriguingly, among Liberal Democrats there is not the same sentiment. Indeed, one of the most significant lines of the day might well

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The House of Lords Makes No Sense; Which is Why it Works

Of all the cockamamie ploys favoured by this government, House of Lords reform is close to being both the most pointless and the most aggravating. Iain Martin hints at this in his recent Telegraph post but he is, in the end, too kind to the Deputy Prime Minister. This is the sort of wheeze favoured by undergraduates blessed with second-class second-class minds. It is close to pointless because even if anyone outside the tiny world of “progressive” think tanks thought this a vital issue there is no evidence that it is in the slightest bit necessary. Which explains why it is aggravating. Th House of Lords, as presently constituted (that

Peter Hoskin

What good would an annual National Strategy do?

Another set of bad notices for Cameron & Co. this morning, chief among them the Public Administration Select Committee’s report into government strategy. It basically says that there is none: short-term fripperies are indulged at the expense of long-term objectives. Or as the report puts it in one of its most trenchant passages, ‘We have little confidence that policies are informed by a clear, coherent strategic approach, informed by an assessment of the public’s aspirations and their perceptions of the national interest.’ This is a diagnosis that many will agree with, partially if not in full. Most governments could do with more long-term thinking, let alone one that is split