Liberal democrats

I’ve just read through George Osborne’s speech to the CBI annual dinner last night, and there’s much in there about free markets and tax cuts that will encourage Tory supporters.  But one passsage seemed a little strange to me: “And on the subject of coalitions, let me be absolutely frank. As a member of the negotiating team, we did consider whether we could try to bluff our way into a minority government. But it was David Cameron’s bold vision and Nick Clegg’s great foresight which saw, before anyone else, that that option would be the greatest compromise of all. A weak, unstable government, risking defeat night after night in Parliament.

With Ed Balls and John McDonnell announcing their candidatures for the Labour leadership, it’s clear that Labour’s soul-searching period has now begun in earnest.  Speaking in front of the cameras just now, Balls reeled of the lines that he’s been priming over the past week: “listening … immigration … listening … beyond Blair and Brown,” etc.  While McDonnell was keen to separate himself from the other candidates, describing them as the “sons of Blair and the sons of Brown”. Both of them might care to read David Lammy’s appraisal of where it went wrong for Labour – and where it went right for Cameron – in tomorrow’s issue of the

One of the things that critics of the LibCon coalition keep coming back to is the question of what will happen in European, local and other elections. Will the two governing parties stand against each other? And how can they differentiate themselves when they support the same policies? To many, it seems like David Cameron and Nick Clegg are suggesting that we all walk backwards – odd, uncomfortable and unlikely to ensure progress. But why is this so odd? This kind of electioneering happens in many other countries. Take Denmark. There, a Liberal-Conservative government has been in power for almost a decade and across several elections, yet the two governing

There is a massive difference between rebellious talk and actual rebellion. But some of the language surrounding the 55 percent rule has been striking. When I told one senior MP that David Cameron had said on Sunday that he would whip this vote, the MP shot back defiantly, ‘you whip if you want to.’ David Davis’s intervention on the issue on the World at One was particularly significant. Having called the 55 percent rule ‘just a terrible formula for government’ it is hard to see how he can support the measure. It is also hard to imagine that a man who picks his fights so carefully would have marched so

The cover of today’s Sunday Times spells out what we all suspected anyway: that the Labour government left behind acre upon acre of scorched earth for the Tories to contend with.  There’s the £13 billion contract for tanker aircraft, the £1.2 billion “e-borders” IT project, a £420 million spend on schools, and so on – most of them put in place just before the election.  As James said earlier, Sir Alan Budd’s audit of the public finances is likely to show that things are much worse than the last Budget dared admit. All this throws open the wider question of our debt position.  Even by Labour’s measures, our national debt

Plenty of eyes on the Tory grandees at the moment.  I mean, the right of the party isn’t exactly delighted with the LibCon coalition – so the search is on for figureheads to lead the resistance.  Which is why Andrew Neil’s interview with Douglas Hurd on Staight Talk this weekend is worth paying attention to. As it happens, Lord Hurd is quite complementary towards David Cameron and his role in organising the coalition.  Here’s the actual quote: “I think it was a brave thing to do.  It might have gone terribly wrong, but he went straight for it and he was completely straightforward in saying this is what this is,