Uk politics

Thursday

Isabel Hardman

Alex Salmond’s persecution complex

Alex Salmond gave a very good speech earlier today about why Scots should vote for independence. It was full of the sort of emotion and rhetoric that the ‘No’ campaign is only now beginning to summon in the final few days of campaigning. He said: ‘A ‘Yes’ vote is about building something better. It is about the growing acceptance across virtually every community in Scotland that no-one, absolutely no-one, is better-placed to govern Scotland than the people here ourselves. No-one cares more about this country, and no-one will do a better job of governing this country than the people of Scotland.’ listen to ‘Salmond: ‘This is the moment to believe’’

Wednesday

James Forsyth

New poll puts No ahead in the Scottish referendum campaign

Tonight brings the first morale boost for the No campaign in a wee while, a Daily Record poll has them 53-47 ahead. Including don’t knows, the numbers are No 47.6%, Yes 42.4% and don’t know 9.9%. A while back, a 53-47 poll would have been regarded as alarming by the No camp. But a week is a long time in politics and tonight’s numbers will be seen as a reassuring sign that a Salmond victory is not inevitable and that independence doesn’t have unstoppable momentum. Particularly reassuring for the No side is that the number of Labour voters backing independence has fallen, which suggests that the bleeding on that front

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

The result of the Scottish referendum will be seismic whether yes or no

It is very difficult to see how David Cameron would survive a ‘Yes’ vote in the Scottish referendum. There are certainly Conservatives who are making detailed plans to oust the Prime Minister if Scotland does vote to leave. But it is also worth noting that a ‘No’ vote would not ensure an easy ride for the Conservative leader with his party. A number of Tory backbenchers are unsettled by the speed at which the parties have moved to promise devo-more. They say they can’t see the point at which the government moved from resisting devo-max to all three Westminster parties promising a significant transfer of powers. And they will cause

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Cameron and Miliband have panicked well today

While Westminster sent its own plea to Scottish voters, David Cameron and Ed Miliband were both making fine, impassioned speeches that both tried to scotch the SNP line that a ‘Yes’ vote was the only way to achieve a fairer Scotland. David Cameron had to address to specific – and quite beguiling – argument that this is Scotland’s chance to get rid of the Tories, that from independence onwards, it will never be governed by parties poorly represented within its borders. He did so by being a little attention-seeking: ‘I think the third thing that can come across in the remaining part of this campaign is the scale of the

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

PMQs: Harman and Hague drop the questions and give a joint speech to save the Union

PMQs was an odd affair today, and not just because there was no PM. It was more that William Hague and Harriet Harman, left in charge while their respective leaders try to save the Union, didn’t really do a question time at all. Their entire exchange was one speech pleading with the Scots to stay, stitched together. What questions Harman did ask were merely rhetorical ‘doesn’t-he-agree’ sorts, rather than an attempt to extract information from the Leader of the House. It was a very positive joint speech about the benefits of the United Kingdom and the success of the Union. But we learned nothing – which was the point, really,

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Britain gets better European Commissioner job than expected

Jean-Claude Juncker clearly appreciated that high-five David Cameron gave him in Brussels recently: he’s appointed Lord Hill to a sizeable economic portfolio as the UK’s European Commissioner. The full list of jobs, published here, is being billed as a ‘strong and experienced team standing for change’, and Hill, who Juncker reportedly had to google, takes the Financial Stability, Financial Services and Capital Markets Union portfolio. This means that has oversight of a key interest: regulations affecting the City. David Cameron is a little more worried about another Union today, but this appointment is a boost to his plans to renegotiate Britain’s relationship with the European Union. It shows that he did

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Indyref panic spreads to cool heads

There’s nothing wrong with a bit of last minute pressure to concentrate the mind, if it produces the right sort of results. The problem is that the pressure of the last few days of the Scottish independence referendum seems to be getting to a lot of the coolest Westminster politicians. Alistair Darling sounded genuinely unsettled when he sat in the Today programme studio on Monday, and today it was Sir John Major’s turn to sound panicked. The problem with this sort of panic was that the former Prime Minister failed to make much of a positive case for the Union while sounding utterly terrified of the impact of Scottish independence,

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman

Westminster is definitely not panicking or cobbling together anything

Here are a number of things that the Westminster parties’ response to the narrowing Scottish independence polls have definitely not been. Absolutely definitely not. 1. A cobbled-together response The three parties deciding to announce the new powers for Scotland and timetable for the handover of those powers in the event of a ‘No’ vote may, to the untrained eye, have looked like a last-minute, last-ditch attempt to reverse the fortunes of the Better Together campaign. But no, argued Nick Clegg today when he sat before the the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee. ‘I don’t accept the characterisation this has all been sort of cobbled together at the last minute.’ The

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Why I am voting No

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_11_Sept_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Fraser Nelson, Tom Holland and Leah McLaren discuss how we can still save the Union” startat=50] Listen [/audioplayer]Once upon a time, a long while ago, I lived in Dublin. It was a time when everything seemed possible and not just because I was younger then. The country was stirring too. When I arrived it was still the case that a visa to work in the United States was just about the most valuable possession any young Irishman or woman could own; within a fistful of years that was no longer the case. Ireland was changing. These were the years in which the Celtic Tiger was born. They were

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Will this desperate last-minute tactic save the ‘No’ campaign?

The Nationalists are of course right: this is a desperate last-minute tactic that the anti-independence camp never thought they’d have to dig out before 18 September. But with polls continually showing that the result is now too close to call, further powers on taxation and welfare, revealed by Gordon Brown last night, are an essential desperate last-minute tactic that the anti-independence camp needed to wheel out. Surgeons sometimes have to do desperate, last minute procedures to stop a patient dying in theatre, and sometimes those last-ditch attempts work. But no-one ever wants to be in that position. But is this promise of more powers – still quite technical – the

Monday

Isabel Hardman

Surprise? Gordon Brown sets out devolution timetable

Is Gordon Brown going on a freelancing operation with his timetable for new powers for a Scotland that votes ‘No’? The former Prime Minister has this afternoon released the timetable for further devolution, with the formal process beginning the day after the result, leading to a draft Scotland Bill being published by Burns Night in January 2015. Brown will say tonight that Labour is ‘taking the initiative’, but it seems that David Cameron hasn’t discussed this announcement with him and that this initiative-taking has taken Downing Street by surprise (it might also be surprised that Gordon Brown is taking the initiative on anything, but especially given the Prime Minister’s official

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Alistair Darling: I’m still confident No campaign will win

Alistair Darling continues to insist that he’s confident of victory in the Scottish independence campaign, telling the Today programme this morning that ‘I am confident that we will win, because we do have a very strong positive vision of what Scotland can be’. But he didn’t strengthen that vision either with further promises about powers that Scotland could expect in the event of a ‘No’ vote, or indeed with any change of tack in his campaign rhetoric. The former Chancellor’s arguments this morning were very much those he has doggedly stuck to all along that have held back wavering voters from supporting ‘Yes’. But when ‘Yes’ has the Big Mo,

Sunday

James Forsyth

People power can save the Union

If Scotland does vote for separation—as the latest YouGov poll suggests it will, we’ll enter the most unpredictable political period in living memory. But before we start contemplating the consequences of a Yes vote, it is worth thinking about what is giving independence momentum in Scotland. It is not just being driven by nationalist fervour but by the same anti-politics sentiment that is riling politics right across the United Kingdom. Voters who are fed up with Westminster and disappointed by politics are seeing voting Yes as a chance to rip up the whole system and start again. Breaking up the United Kingdom is, perhaps, the ultimate expression of anti-politics. This

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Come in Britain, your time is up

How do you kill an idea? That is the Unionist quandary this weekend. For a long time now the Better Together campaign has based its hostility to Scottish independence on the risks and uncertainties that, unavoidably, come with independence. This, they say, is what tests well with their focus groups. No-one gives a stuff about all that identity crap, they say, so there’s no need to talk about it. Instead, hype the unknowns – of both the known and unknown variety – and bang on and on about all that risk and all that uncertainty. Which, like, is fine. Until the point it ceases to be fine. Until the point

Saturday

Isabel Hardman

Shock poll: Scotland’s ‘Yes’ campaign pulls into lead. It’s 51% to 49%

Tomorrow’s Sunday Times poll by YouGov puts the Yes campaign ahead at 51 per cent, with No on 49 per cent when undecided voters are excluded (even when they’re included, ‘yes’ are still ahead by two points: 47-45). In the space of four weeks, ‘No’ has blown a 22-point lead. It was only recently that the No campaign started to wonder whether this could happen: previously there was an acceptance that the polls could narrow in the last few weeks, but the narrative was that the SNP were behind and were simply trying to engineer a close enough defeat for them to argue for a significant new settlement for Scotland. Now

Andrew Brown

The theological illiteracy of Eric Pickles

It is worrying that Eric Pickles is in charge of religion for this government. I first came across his footprints in Bradford, where in the Eighties he was as much responsible as any other politician for the introduction of ‘multicultural’ policies into English cities. He understood that there were Pakistani Muslim votes at stake, and introduced policies to gratify their sensibilities, something conveniently forgotten once he moved down to Essex. The central flaw in this policy was not that it encouraged Islam but that it locked Pakistani machine politics into the indigenous machine politics of local government. Labour turned out to be the main beneficiary of the process, though you

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The irresponsibility of Andy Burnham

Nothing matters more in British politics right now than keeping the country together. The polls in Scotland show that no one can be complacent about the result on the 18th of September. One thing that has helped the Nationalists to close the gap in Scotland is a serious of alarmist predictions about the NHS. They have seized on some of Andy Burnham’s overblown rhetoric to claim that the NHS south of the border is about to be privatised and that this will have a knock-on effect on Scotland. Given this, a period of silence on Mr Burnham’s part until after the referendum would be most welcome. But this morning, Burnham

Friday

Isabel Hardman

Government loses ‘bedroom tax’ vote

The government has just lost a vote in the House of Commons on the ‘bedroom tax’/removal of the spare-room subsidy/underoccupancy penalty/Size Criteria for People Renting in the Social Rented Sector (the correct, if rather clunky, name). There was a three-line whip from the Tories on the vote, but the Lib Dems had decided they would support their colleague Andrew George’s bill to exempt those who cannot move to a smaller home, or who are disabled and live in an adapted property. The Bill had its second reading in the House of Commons today, and passed 306 votes to 231. Jacob Rees-Mogg moved an amendment that the Bill should be considered

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters: Andrew Roberts on Cameron, and a defence of Kate Bush

Advice for Cameron Sir: David Cameron once saved my life from a school of Portuguese man o’ war jellyfish, so now’s the time for me to save his political life with this advice: to do nothing. The British people are a fair-minded lot; they will give him another term in office because he and George Osborne have delivered the best growth rates in Europe despite the monstrous overspending and boom-bust of the Blair-Brown years. Every newly incoming ministry since the war has been re-elected — except Ted Heath’s, which broke all the rules anyhow — and this one will be too. Douglas Carswell is an intelligent man who has made

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Can the Tory party locate its secret weapon?

It used to be said that loyalty was the Tory party’s secret weapon. But this supposed strength hasn’t been very apparent in recent years. Indeed, at times, it seems that the Tory party hasn’t quite recovered from the demons unleashed by Margaret Thatcher’s ouster twenty-odd years ago.   Douglas Carswell’s defection means that Westminster, when it is not panicking about the Scottish referendum, is chuntering about whether his move to Ukip is the harbinger of a bigger Tory split to come, one that The Spectator explores this week. Worryingly for the Tory loyalists, there are people on all sides of the party are preparing for this fight.  As one Tory