Marriage

Good afternoon. I’d like to thank you all for coming to this godforsaken hell hole – sorry, I mean, Ed’s constituency. Believe it or not, I once expressed an interest in becoming the Labour MP for Doncaster North, but as soon as Ed heard about it he tossed his hat into the ring. Funny that. I’m going to start by reading a few telegrams from people who couldn’t be here today. [Reading]: “Dear Ed, Thanks for your kind invitation, but I’d rather stick pins in my eyes.” [Looking up]: That’s from my wife, Louise. [Reading]: “Dear Ed, I’m happy to pick up the tab. You can pay me back when

Well, it turns out that ‘Red Ed’ is really a social conservative. As both Pete and James say, his speech contained notable sallies into Cameroon territory – community and family. He didn’t follow Cameron’s trail to the metre, but fell into many of the same ditches. Two things struck me: 1). Ever the opportunist, Miliband sees that there is the kernel of a good idea at the root of the ‘Big Society’ and tried to exploit Cameron’s inability to present it. Miliband’s gave us the ‘Good Society’, a clear though sanctimonious slogan for community renewal. However, he, like Cameron, can’t define what he means by community. He talked about post

Life has imitated art – or Jilly Cooper in this case. The former chief executive of the National Pony Club, Caroline Nokes MP, 37, has been having a three year affair with a Tory toy boy, Councillor James Dinsdale, 27. Theirs was an affair of hotel-room assignations and steamy conference meetings – Bournemouth has little else to commend it. They were outed by the Sunday Mirror. Mrs Nokes, a married mother of one, was photographed entering the Kensington Close Hotel last Monday night. Minutes later, Mr Dinsdale arrived, casually dressed in a blue hoodie. Taking a ‘Hug a Hoodie’ to extremes, Mrs Nokes checked out at 8:30 the following morning.

Despite what the headline might make you think, this item is not an April Fool. In a web chat with Saga magazine, Brown said: “We made it possible for people to transfer their allowances so…between husband and wife…and that means widows for example can have the full benefit of the husband’s previous allowance, and that meant for a large number of people the effective point at which they started paying inheritance tax was above £600,000. So you know for most people that situation has changed quite dramatically over the last few years by the doubling, effectively, of the allowance that is available to a family, and it’s a recognition of

Maybe it’s just a slow Saturday, but the Conservatives’ latest WebCameron video (see below) strikes me as one of the most effective yet. The pitch is straightforward: make an appeal to people who voted New Labour or who “have never voted Tory before”.  So things like Sure Start and the minimum wage get a namecheck. But, aside from that, it’s striking just how clearly and unequivocally Cameron sets out Tory commitments such as recognising marriage in the tax system. Indeed, the passage on the “root causes of our social breakdown”, and how the Tories would deal with them, harkens back to his powerful address at the party conference.  Only, this

A strident interview from David Cameron in today’s Express, in which he touches on everything from inheritance tax to not, never, ever joining the Euro. It’s this passage that jumped out at me, though: “Middle Britain has had a wretched time under Labour. This Government has taxed mortgages, marriages, pensions, petrol and travel and raised national insurance and the top rate of income tax. We cannot keep squeezing hard-working families.” Why so noteworthy? Well, off the top of my head, this is the first time that Cameron has referred to the current system as a “tax on marriage”. In which case, you wonder if the Tories are planning to place

Here’s a question: to be a good angel or a bad angel? We know what Fraser thinks; Matthew Parris differs. Writing in the Times today, he asserts that he would give David Cameron the same advice he offered Margaret Thatcher in 1979: agree a gloriously unspecific manifesto. The details of hard-edged manifestos are ambushed well before polling day; discretion is the better part of valour. In the immediate circumstances of the Tory wobble both arguments are commendable. The Tories have unwound when trying to supply detail to flesh out their broadly radical ideas. Recognising marriage in the tax system has been their foremost blunder. The impassioned denunciation of Labour’s record on

For some time, Labour has been trying to push the line that behind the Cameron facade there’s an old-school, “nasty” party waiting, drooling, for an opportunity to engineer the country as they see fit.  Over the past couple of days, it’s become clear that they’ve struck on a new variant of that attack. Yesterday, we had Ed Balls on Today saying that the Tories’ marriage tax break was a “back to basics” policy.  And, today, as Paul Waugh reveals, Harriet Harman described the same agenda as “modern day back to basics. It is back to basics in an open-necked shirt.”  The reference, of course, is to John Major’s ill-fated, relaunch

There’s something quite refreshing about David Cameron’s plan to offer a tax break to married couples.  It says, simply: this is what I believe.  And it does so in spite of polling data and strategic arguments to the contrary.  This is one area where you certainly couldn’t accuse the Tory leader of caring too much about what other people think.  But refreshing or not, that doesn’t make it good policy.  Of course, there’s a tonne of empirical data which demonstrates the benefits of marriage.  That’s important and persuasive.  But, as I’ve written before, there are reasons to doubt the efficacy of a tax break in particular.  And I don’t think