Uk politics

This story first went out in tonight’s Evening Blend email, a free round-up and analysis of the day’s political developments. Sign up here. Mark Reckless seems pretty confident of a win in today’s Rochester and Strood by-election – sources have told Coffee House that the Commons authorities have been asked whether he can be introduced as a Ukip MP tomorrow so that he can vote on Clive Efford’s NHS bill. When asked, Reckless told Coffee House: ‘In terms of the procedures, they are convoluted so I’ve asked other people to look at it in terms of what’s possible to do. Others are looking at those but I don’t know if they’ve reached

Who is tougher on immigration? Neither the Tories nor Labour want to be left behind by Ukip, and have descended into an arms race over who can best crack down on EU migration. Today Ed Miliband’s party launched a two-pronged attack on the subject, with Yvette Cooper speaking in the morning about her plans to hire 1,000 additional border guards by imposing a charge on visitors from certain countries including the US, and Rachel Reeves announcing plans for a clampdown on EU migrants claiming out-of-work benefits. Amusingly, Reeves gave her policy to the MailOnline as an exclusive, just a few days after Ed Miliband spoke about dark forces out to get

A week after uproar in the Commons over the vote on the European Arrest Warrant that was or wasn’t a vote, depending on what you fancied believing, Theresa May faced MPs at Home Office questions where she was rather quickly pulled up on that debacle. Shadow Home Office minister David Hanson asked why the House of Lords did get a vote on the European Arrest Warrant when MPs were denied the opportunity last week. May replied: ‘I have to say to the right honourable gentleman that I was very clear and in fact we spent quite a considerable time last Wednesday discussing the motion that had been brought forward by

Mainstream politicians still aren’t sure how to talk about Ukip. There’s the question of whether the party’s European election and by-election successes will power them to a good result at the 2015 election, or whether this protest movement will fade a little by the time voters start thinking about the sort of government they like. There’s the question of whether Ukip is borrowing members of each mainstream party’s ‘core vote’, or whether neither the Tories nor Labour should consider voters ‘theirs’ any more anyway. And then there’s the question of how to talk about Ukip. Most senior politicians are agreed that you can’t call people who vote for Ukip fruitcakes or

Philip Hammond’s interview in The Telegraph this morning is striking for several reasons. First, Hammond admits that Britain isn’t going to regain full control of its borders in the renegotiation. As he puts it, ‘“If your ambition is that we have total unfettered control of our own borders to do what we like, that isn’t compatible with membership of the European Union, it’s as simple as that. And people who advocate that know jolly well it is not compatible with membership of the European Union. So if that’s what you want, you’re essentially talking about leaving the European Union.”   But he does seem to think that agreement on something

The Conservatives have released a rather silly leaflet for the Rochester by-election contrasting Mark Reckless with their candidate Kelly Tolhurst. As if to highlight that it might be a silly leaflet, it features the phrase ‘the straight choice’, which some thought had gone out of fashion in 1983. Then it goes through Tolhurst’s local credentials, followed by Reckless’s Establishment background. You can see what they’re trying to do here, which is to undermine Ukip’s anti-Establishment pitch. That’s why the Conservatives held a postal primary to select their new candidate once Reckless had defected. But what makes all this sudden interest in local candidates for local people, open primaries and so