uk politics Archives

Thursday

22 Jan 2015

If you’re going to have seven parties in the TV debates, you’ve got to include the DUP

Having seven parties in two of the TV debates, as the broadcasters are reportedly proposing, is an admission that what matters is not whether the party will provide the Prime Minister but whether it might have influence in a hung parliament. On this basis, there is no justification for excluding the DUP. The DUP currently have eight seats in the Commons, more than Plaid Cymru, Ukip and the Greens put together. Even after the next election, the DUP are likely to have more MPs than any of these parties. It is baffling that the broadcasters have ended up concluding that Plaid Cymru, who have fewer MPs than the DUP and

Isabel Hardman

Broadcasters to propose new set of TV election debates

The broadcasters have reportedly come up with a new set of proposals for the TV debates in order to force David Cameron to sign up. The Radio Times reports that they now want to hold one debate where the Prime Minister will face Ed Miliband, and two debates that feature almost everyone – Conservatives, Labour, the Lib Dems, the Greens, Ukip, SNP and Plaid Cymru. This doesn’t just answer Cameron’s stipulation that the Greens must be involved, but answers the next question that would then be posed, which is what about the nationalist parties. Unless he suddenly starts talking about the importance of George Galloway, the Prime Minister will find it

Isabel Hardman

Tories run two rickety databases in target seats

The Conservatives are running two voter databases, neither of which are fully functioning, in their key constituencies, Coffee House has learned. The party had been trying to get rid of its frail database Merlin, which keeps breaking during by-elections and at other crucial moments, in time for the General Election. But it hasn’t quite managed it yet, and is instead running Merlin alongside a new, but not fully-tested, database called VoteSource. Candidates in target seats say VoteSource is currently working for them, but that it is lacking some of the functions it was supposed to have by this point and they do not know how it will cope with big

Sebastian Payne

Podcast: Comedy meets politics and Osborne’s 13 tests for No.10

Why has politics turned into stand-up comedy? On this week’s View from 22 podcast, Andrew Watts and Jesse Norman MP discuss this week’s Spectator cover feature on how these two worlds are colliding. What does the increased influence of comedy mean for our faith in politics? Aside from notably humorous politicians like Boris Johnson, how funny are MPs generally? And which member of the Labour shadow cabinet is deemed so funny he could be a professional stand-up? James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman also look at 13 tests to make it into Downing Street set by George Osborne — in 2004. Based on a Spectator piece he wrote earlier in his

Andrew Watts

Send in the clowns – how comedy ate British politics

Something funny is happening in this country. Our comedians are becoming politicians and our politicians are becoming comedians — and public life is turning into an endless stream of jokes. Last week, the comedian Al Murray announced that he would be standing at the next general election in the constituency of South Thanet, the same seat that Nigel Farage is contesting. Al Murray performs in the persona of ‘The Pub Landlord’. A sexist reactionary, never pictured without a beer in his hand, forever declaiming ‘common-sense’ solutions to Britain’s problems, Nigel Farage has welcomed the additional competition. Murray has refused to say what, if any, serious intentions lie behind his announcement

Ross Clark

Blame Tony Blair for Labour’s new stupidity about wealth

Peter Mandelson’s famous quote about New Labour being intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich has a suffix that is often mischievously omitted: he added ‘so long as they pay their taxes’. But there are a few more things which many Labour members would have put on the end: so long as you don’t earn it by advising Central Asian dictatorships, so long as you don’t hang around with Russian oligarchs, so long as you don’t make it from the Saudis. Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson got filthy rich all right. But the whiff they gave off while doing so has only served to regenerate a very Old Labour disgust

James Forsyth

George Osborne’s 13 tests for an election victory (and how many he’s passed)

These days George Osborne is rarely seen in public without a hard hat and a hi-vis jacket. But he used to take pride in being recognised as a political insider through and through — a member of the guild of politicians, in his own phrase. He revelled in writing detailed articles about the lessons Westminster could learn from American politics. Several of these were written for The Spectator when Boris Johnson was the editor, which shows how far back the relationship between the Chancellor and the Mayor of London goes. (Osborne was at Oxford as the same time as Johnson’s younger brother Jo, now an MP and the head of

Matthew Parris

The Stonewall dinner left me with one question: why are volunteers so horrible to one another?

I watched the video with some trepidation. Stonewall (the campaigning gay and lesbian equality organisation) had just sent me the YouTube link. This was to a short film of the dinner that Stonewall’s founders attended last year to celebrate the quarter-century anniversary of our existence; and most of us had been there. Now we were but wrinkled reminders of the young revolutionaries we had once been. So this could have been a rather mellow occasion. We had started the organisation as a defiant response to what came to be known as ‘Section 28’: a small measure that was part of a sprawling local government bill and intended to stop the

Wednesday

21 Jan 2015

Isabel Hardman

Ministers to introduce plain-packaging for cigarettes

The government has finally decided to bring in plain packaging laws for cigarettes. This U-turn is a sort of U-turn because MPs will get a free vote on it, after David Cameron recognised the depth of feeling in his party on the issue, so the government has decided to bring in plain packaging, but in as gentle a way as possible. In fact, it is a rotation through 360 degrees, as the original position had been in favour of plain packaging, which was then reversed in 2013. There will be a sizeable chunk of Conservative MPs who oppose the measure, which public health minister Jane Ellison says is a ‘proportionate

James Forsyth

Tory MPs split over how far to push English votes for English laws

Tory backbenchers have just finished a long meeting about English Votes for English Laws. The 1922 Committee of Tory backbenchers have just spent the last hour and a bit debating the matter with William Hague in attendance. The question at issue was whether the Tories should bar all MPs other than English ones from voting on English-only issues. Or, whether they should limit their plans to only allowing English MPs to vote on English laws at committee stage and giving them a veto before third reading. The leadership is thought to favour the latter option and Malcolm Rifkind and Ken Clarke both spoke up for it. But there was considerable

Isabel Hardman

Could Britain cope with a minority Coalition government?

For all the obsessing about whether Nick Clegg would prefer to be in government with the Tories or Labour after the next election, there is very little discussion of what happens if that just isn’t enough. On 8 May 2015 we could find ourselves with a parliament made up both of a largest party too small for a majority government and a third party too small to form a stable two-party coalition government. If the Tories fail to gain seats, or lose a few, and the Lib Dems have a terrible night too, then they will still need MPs from another party to prop them up. So who do they

James Forsyth

PMQs: Cameron canters home

David Cameron cantered home at PMQs today. Armed with both good employment numbers, praise from Obama and the IMF for the UK economy and the delay in publication to the Chilcot Report, he held off Miliband with ease. The Labour leader, so feisty last week, seemed oddly listless today, getting animated only when he accused Cameron of running scared of TV debates. Cameron, by contrast, seemed to be enjoying himself. He even found time to mock Miliband’s disastrous stint as a house guest in Doncaster, as chronicled in the Mail on Sunday at the weekend. Perhaps, though, the most significant moment of the session came right at the end when

Alex Massie

Delaying publication of the Chilcot report is the right thing to do

I don’t know about you but I tend to think Sir John Chilcot’s report into the Iraq war should not be published before it is finished. Actually, I do know about you and I know I hold to the minority view on this matter. So be it. Fashionable opinion is not on my side. Then again, fashionable opinion thinks Tony Blair is a war criminal so we may safely treat fashionable opinion with the contempt it has earned. It can go hang. Nevertheless, as Isabel says this new delay will feed a perception the report is crooked. That is, zoomers zoom and morons gonna moron and there’s nothing anyone else can do

Isabel Hardman

Chilcot delay will feed suspicions about politics, not just the inquiry

Even though publication of the Chilcot report in the weeks before a General Election would have hardly been ideal, it would have been better than it being delayed until after voters make their decision in May. Patrick Wintour’s story in today’s Guardian confirms that the report is being held up while those named in it respond to the allegations against them. Politicians are furious, partly because they know the public will be unimpressed. Nick Clegg aptly summed it up in his letter to Sir John Chilcot last night, saying ‘there is a real danger the public will assume the report is being ‘sexed down’ by individuals rebutting criticisms put to

Tuesday

20 Jan 2015

Isabel Hardman

Are the Blairites sitting comfortably for Labour’s election campaign?

Lord Mandelson likes to think he knows a thing or two about Labour winning elections. So it’s odd that the man so keen on message discipline should start sticking his oar into the debate about Labour’s policies with just weeks to go before the General Election. Is it that the Labour peer doesn’t think Labour will win and so was throwing caution to the wind by popping up on Newsnight to call the Mansion Tax crude and say the Lib Dems had a better-designed policy? To make matters more bizarre, he found himself being congratulated by Diane Abbott of all people, with the leftwing hopeful for Labour’s mayoral candidacy saying

Isabel Hardman

Could Labour limit its tuition fee cap to ‘useful’ subjects?

One of the really big policy areas that Labour has yet to resolve before the General Election is how it can lower the cap on tuition fees to £6,000. University Vice-Chancellors have been in talks with the party for a very long time, and have been urging Ed Balls and Ed Miliband to get on with making a decision about their future funding arrangements. One of the things delaying this decision is that there isn’t really enough money to get the cap down to £6,000 for all degrees. A couple of the papers have suggested in the past few days that the party may only lower the cap for technical

Isabel Hardman

PM and Education Secretary at odds over Page 3

The ministers covering women and equalities do have a view on the disappearance of topless Page 3 models, but the Prime Minister apparently doesn’t. Today Nicky Morgan called the decision of The Sun to put something over at least a portion of the breasts of the women in its paper ‘a long overdue decision and marks a small but significant step towards improving media portrayal of women and girls. I very much hope it remains permanent’. Her Lib Dem colleague Jo Swinson said she was delighted that the old fashioned sexism of Page 3 could soon be a thing of the past’ and called on the newspaper’s editors ‘to consider whether

Isabel Hardman

Ukip is sticking to the mainstream line on the NHS

One reason that Ukip seems rather quiet at the moment is that it doesn’t have very much policy to talk about. And one reason for that is that there’s a row going on over the slow progress of the party’s manifesto. The Times today says Ukip has sacked Tim Aker from writing the manifesto – as Seb pointed out recently, he did have rather a lot to do, what with being a Ukip councillor, fighting for the party in a marginal seat and writing the manifesto – because he was running behind deadline. But one thing we can be certain of is that Ukip’s manifesto, when it does come out, will play

Monday

19 Jan 2015

Isabel Hardman

Team Boris are catching ‘interesting fish’

Who are the latest contenders in the Tory leadership battle and how much support do they have? That’s the question that Tory MPs and pundits love to chew over, even though there is no contest. The latest fixation is whether George Osborne has rowed behind the Boris campaign. James looked at this yesterday, revealing that Boris might quite fancy taking over from David Cameron after an EU referendum in 2017. Of course, the funny thing is that there isn’t a leadership contest because David Cameron is currently secure as Prime Minister. And as I explain in today’s Evening Standard, he could be secure for a while longer – where Tory

Isabel Hardman

Chuka Umunna shouldn’t have lost his temper on TV. But he was right to refuse to comment on something he hadn’t read

Chuka Umunna’s fit of pique at the end of his Sky interview was unnecessary. One of the skills of a politician who fancies being a leader is to look calm and reasonable in the face of unreasonable questions. But to be fair to Labour’s Shadow Business Secretary, there is nothing wrong with refusing to comment on something you don’t know enough about. There’s something very off-putting and insincere about a politician who blags their way through an interview or panel session like an English student pontificating their way through a seminar on a book they never bothered to read. He could have read those detailed media briefings that Labour sends