Uk politics

Friday

Isabel Hardman

Farage uses speech to clarify his position

Nigel Farage’s speech to the Ukip conference was fine. Not a bad speech, but not his best speech, either. It was just fine. Activists seemed happy, ecstatic, even when he came on, and were joyful chanting when he left the stage too. But Farage clearly wanted to answer a number of questions about his own position. The Ukip leader started by pointing out that there had been a number of questions about his whereabouts, and that some of his opponents had tried to spread some unpleasant rumours that he was unwell (there have been some rumours circulating in Westminster to that effect, though it’s unclear where they originated from). ‘Rumours

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Ukip backs Osborne’s deficit plans – but how would Farage cut spending?

The Ukip spring conference is underway in Margate today, with the party starting the two days of speeches and fringes with a pledge that it will match the Tory plan to eliminate the deficit by 2017/18. Nigel Farage has said that this support is conditional on the Tories keeping their promises, but it will be interesting, once he has arrived at the conference from the US, to see how he articulates a Ukip vision for cutting the deficit.  Given the party has spent a fair while talking about what it wouldn’t cut, for example the ‘Bedroom Tax’, it may find it less enjoyable to talk about what it would cut.

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

What Ukip needs from its spring conference

Ukip has put all the journalists in a special balcony above the main auditorium at its spring conference. It’s quite thoughtful of the party, as the gallery is right next to the press room where hacks can file, but it also means that they’re a little apart from the delegates. Sitting on the floor of the hall, I overheard a party official talking to a delegate. ‘Those people over there,’ he said, pointing to the gallery. ‘Are here to take the piss.’ To be fair, one of the jobs that the press in this country does very well is to take the mick out of politicians whose bloated egos could

Thursday

Toby Young

If you think Britain’s corrupt now, watch what happens if we ban second jobs for MPs

Last year, I had an exchange with Hugo Rifkind on Twitter in which I bet him dinner at Clarke’s that his father would stand down before the next election. My reasoning was that, at the age of 68, his dad wouldn’t want to serve another five years in the Commons and would be happier in the Lords. I hadn’t anticipated he would depart as a result of a cash-for-access scandal. I’ve always rather fancied running in Kensington myself. Rifkind has a majority of 8,616, which makes it a safe seat, and it’s only a 15-minute cycle ride from my house. But I’m not going to throw my hat into the

The Spectator

The real problem with our MPs: they’re obsessed with the super-rich

Had the public been asked, before Monday morning, to identify two MPs who stood for honesty and decency, the names Jack Straw and Sir Malcolm Rifkind would have been prominent among their replies. Both have served as foreign secretary, Straw also as home secretary and justice secretary. Neither seemed unduly driven by personal ambition, nor were they the worst offenders in the expenses scandal. Both are probably right in saying that they have not broken any rules when discussing work opportunities with employees of a Chinese company who turned out to be undercover Daily Telegraph reporters. But it is astonishing that both seemed to believe this sufficient to let them

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Why are the Lib Dems spending so much time talking about mental health?

Nick Clegg is to hold an hour-long phone-in next week on mental health. The Deputy Prime Minister will host the session himself on LBC on Monday. This is part of the emphasis that the Lib Dems are placing on mental health in their election campaigning. Now, there are lots of good reasons why the Lib Dems might want to campaign on mental health, including that it jolly well needs campaigning on because it is, as Clegg says, a ‘Cinderella service’ that suffers from long waits, poor research and less funding, yet one in four people will suffer from some kind of mental ill-health. But there are sound political reasons too.

Sebastian Payne

Ukip is the most trusted party on controlling immigration

Which party does the public trust the most to control immigration? ComRes/ITV News have released a new poll revealing it’s not the Conservatives — unsurprisingly given today’s figures. 36 per cent trust Ukip the most to tackle immigration, compared to 19 per cent for the Tories: [datawrapper chart=”http://static.spectator.co.uk/isCLx/index.html”] The poll also reveals that over half of the public think the impact of immigration on the NHS has been bad. As the chart below shows, perceptions on immigration are mixed. Just over half also think it has had no impact on ‘me personally’ while more than people than not think immigration has had a bad impact on British culture and society and the economy — the latter

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

The Tory trouble to come on defence spending

There are still some unhappy mutterings about the possibility that the Tories won’t commit to spending 2 per cent of GDP on defence in the next Strategic Defence and Security Review. Treasury sources have been pouring cold water on the suggestion that George Osborne has told David Cameron that spending will fall below that target, but that’s because no-one’s making any decisions until they have to, and they only have to make a decision after the election. In any case, we’ve probably seen the full extent of the unhappy mutterings in the past few days anyway – at least, until the election is over. Monday’s Defence Questions saw an unprecedented

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

New figures show Cameron’s net migration target in tatters

Today’s news that lots of people want to come and work in a free, welcoming country with many opportunities and a growing economy is actually very bad news. Not for the economy, or those people, or probably the country, but for the politicians who thought it would be sensible to pledge that by the 2015 election, net migration would be in the ‘tens of thousands’. Today the Office for National Statistics reveals that net long-term migration to the UK was estimated to be 298,000 in the year to September 2014, up from 210,000 in the previous 12 months. Overall 624,000 people immigrated to the UK in the year ending September

Sebastian Payne

Podcast: the SNP threat to Westminster and the myth of a house building crisis

Are the SNP poised to become Westminster’s kingmakers? On this week’s View from 22 podcast, Alex Massie discusses this week’s cover feature on the role the Scottish nationalists could play after the next general election. If the SNP wipe out Labour north of the border, will questions about the future of the union be back on the table? How is propping up a Labour government second prize for the SNP? And are the Scottish elections in 2016 more important to Scottish labour than this year’s battle? James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman also discuss why the upcoming election will not be very general. Are any of the parties planning to fight a national

Zac Goldsmith

Zac Goldsmith: How my dad saved Britain

In recent weeks Ed Balls has been offering a new reason to vote Labour: it was his party, he says, that saved Britain from joining the euro. Now, the shadow chancellor is free to say what he wants — and in a way, I’m pleased that he feels the need to convey such an impression. But the true story of how Britain was saved from the euro is somewhat different. It all happened nearly a generation ago, between 1995 and 1997, when I was in my very early twenties. It was my father, James Goldsmith, who set out to ensure that Britain would never join the euro without the consent

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

How Labour’s 50p tax trick has ended up helping George Osborne

Last week’s public borrowing and tax-receipt figures, headlined ‘Chancellor hails biggest monthly surplus in seven years’, received considerably less attention than the employment and wage-growth numbers a week earlier, underlining my belief that voters care a lot less (or indeed not at all) about the intangible ‘fiscal deficit’ and its implications than they do about their own prospects and spending power. And rightly so. Failure to shrink the deficit at the rate he first promised is nevertheless the one major issue on which George Osborne is seriously open to criticism as Chancellor. But what matters in political terms at this stage is that borrowing this year is 7.5 per cent

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman

Labour unsure about health policy its own councils support

The announcement today that Greater Manchester will receive full control of health spending – worth £6bn – has left Labour in a rather interesting position. On the one hand, it is easy for Andy Burnham to say that this sounds ‘like yet another NHS reorganisation’. But on the other, Greater Manchester includes a number of Labour councils who appear pretty happy to sign up to the provisional deal. Indeed, one of those councils is Wigan, which covers Burnham’s own constituency. Now one of the reasons that spending has been devolved to this area is that councils in Greater Manchester are keen, forward-looking and ambitious. George Osborne has long been a

Ross Clark Ross Clark

The real scandal of zero-hours contracts: HMRC’s greed

Cue the Guardian headlines of ‘exploitation’ in ‘Dickensian’ Britain. Nearly 700,000 people are now working on zero-hours contracts, a rise of 100,000 in just one year. Is that really such a problem? Not among the many people who want flexible work because they want to fit the business of earning money around studying, travelling or other careers. I agree that employers using zero hours contracts should not be allowed to place exclusivity clauses in them, preventing people working elsewhere – and which the government has already said it will ban. But most zero hours contracts do not state this – they offer two-way flexibility, with the employer not obliged to

James Forsyth James Forsyth

PMQs: Second jobs, lobbying and ‘obsessive crackpots’

Ed Miliband boxed cleverer than David Cameron at PMQs today and came out with a comprehensive points victory. Miliband went, predictably, on the whole issue of second jobs for MPs. Cameron, equally predictably, responded that the Labour proposal wouldn’t deal with MPs being paid Union officials. Miliband then, nimbly, said that he’d be happy to amend it to make it clear that this was banned too at which point Cameron was pinned back on the ropes. He was left trying to make his way through the session with increasingly strident references to the influence that the unions have on the Labour party. Now, personally, I think Miliband is wrong on

Sebastian Payne

The Tories need to put Boris front and centre of the campaign — the numbers prove it

Have you seen Boris Johnson? The Mayor of London has been surprisingly absent from the Conservatives’ floundering campaign so far. He was not chosen to be member of the core team fronting the campaign — Sajid Javid, Nicky Morgan, Theresa May, William Hague and George Osborne in case you’d forgotten. His most prominent appearance was standing alongside the Chancellor at an event focused on London. Today’s Times splashes with the story that some Tories are beginning to worry, and wonder, why the Mayor isn’t being used more often. The numbers alone suggest Boris should be on TV screens every night to promote the Conservatives’ cause. According to a poll from YouGov/The Times today, nearly two thirds of

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

As ‘long-term economic plan’ goes global, will Cameron have an easy PMQs?

How will Prime Minister’s Questions go today? Both party leaders have had to deal with troublesome MPs this week, with Jack Straw and Sir Malcolm Rifkind both falling prey to the Dispatches/Telegraph sting. But Ed Miliband may feel that he can continue his theme of cracking down on paid directorships and consultancies, which Labour is running an Opposition Day debate on later today. Rifkind’s response to the sting also dug him into a deeper hole than Straw, who decided rather wisely to talk about what a fool he’d been not to take the advice he had so kindly doled out to colleagues who’d been caught by the same sorts of

Alex Massie Alex Massie

When did it become OK for the police to electrocute children?

Hard as it may be to imagine, dear reader, once upon a time the police managed to fulfil their obligations to society without resorting to electrocuting children. The sky did not fall. Teenage ruffians did not run amok. Life went on, much as it had before. Changed times, of course. These days, the carrying of Tasers has become increasingly normal. And when the police are armed as a matter of course, it’s no surprise that they are increasingly likely to deploy force. Even on children. And pensioners. The youngest person Tasered by the police in England and Wales in 2013 was 14 years old; the oldest a menacing 82 years old.

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Do we now know what the Tory strategy for defence is?

For a while the Tories had hoped they could get away with dodging questions on defence spending until after the election. Even as the pressure within their own party for a commitment to the 2 per cent of GDP set by Nato, ministers were either saying they didn’t want to ‘pre-judge’ the Strategic Defence and Security Review, or trying to turn the question round and ask whether Labour was going to match the current level of spending by this government. Neither was a satisfactory answer, but ministers rather have the impression that with just weeks until Parliament dissolves, they needn’t worry too much. Of course, they reckoned without someone picking

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman

Why Natalie Bennett doesn’t need to do the sums on policy

To be fair to Natalie Bennett, she took the rather admirable step of apologising on the Daily Politics for being so woeful in her disastrous interview with Nick Ferrari this morning. But the whole episode tells us a lot about how the Green party views its appeal to voters. Yes, yes, it’s embarrassing that a party leader boasting about a flagship housing policy ended up sitting in the most painful silence imaginable while she tried to think of how that policy would actually, you know, work. But clearly if she thought that knowing the details of the policy would be important, she might have checked the details before walking into the