Uk politics

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman

Harriet Harman: Labour is making steady progress

‘I don’t think things are going wrong,’ Harriet Harman insisted on the Today programme. ‘I think we’re making steady progress. And if you look at when people actually vote, for example in council elections, then actually around the country we’ve got nearly 2,000 more councillors since Ed Miliband became leader.’ listen to ‘Harman: ‘I don’t think things are going wrong’ with Labour’ on Audioboo Miliband last night admitted on ITV’s The Agenda that 2015 will ‘be a close election’. Harman helped flesh out why when she defended her leader, telling Today that ‘I think that Ed Miliband has absolutely identified that people are feeling a real squeeze on their living

Monday

Isabel Hardman

Cameron continues silver offensive

David Cameron is doing his best to do what the Tories haven’t always been that impressive at: capitalising on the clever political bits in this year’s Budget. He was at a PM direct event in Peacehaven today, driving home the importance of the government’s reforms to pensions to his target voters. But he also had the opportunity to woo them with other policy treats, such as what the Tories might promise on inheritance tax in their next manifesto. ‘Would I like to go further in future?’ he said. ‘Yes, I would. I believe in people being able to pass money down through the generations and pass things on to their

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Michael Gove attacks Tristram Hunt for not knowing difference between education and health

Education questions is always interesting in the sense that the main players are quite energetic and keen for debate and there is a genuine divide now between the two main parties (and indeed within the Coalition). But today’s session was interesting in the sense that a grandmother describes a Christmas present they don’t quite understand as ‘interesting’ because Tristram Hunt used his slot to grill the Education Secretary about a health issue. ‘More and more research shows the importance of early years development in a child’s education. The Labour party Sure Start programme was focused on supporting those vital infant years, a policy of prevention rather than cure. We know

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Labour’s localist lurch

One of the other things worth noting from this morning’s letter from the ‘members of the progressive community’ who are anxious that Labour isn’t attempting to make a big offer in 2015 is that the alliance of groups and figures from the left and right of the party back decentralisation. The letter calls for: ‘Devolution of state institutions, by giving away power and resources to our nations, regions, cities, localities and, where possible, directly to the people.’ As I explained in my Telegraph column last week, a battle in the shadow cabinet has resulted in a surprise victory for Hilary Benn and Jon Cruddas, who had been pushing for a

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Labour thinkers see danger in playing safe

David Cameron’s attack on Labour for “flailing and dithering” over whether to support the government’s pension reforms would seem unfair had the party not struggled to present a clear message over the weekend. It would be unfair to expect a snap judgement on the changes from a responsible opposition party, but the weekend press and the papers this morning suggest that Labour doesn’t even have a neat holding line as it works out how far to extend its support. But what should worry Ed Miliband far more than the attack from Cameron is the increasing anxiety from his own side about Labour’s message. The Guardian’s letter from 19 leading Labour

Sunday

Isabel Hardman

What today’s polls mean for the Tories and Labour

The Labour party’s reaction to today’s opinion polls will tell us a great deal about how well Ed Miliband has really invested in his party. If the backbenchers feel they have a stake in the Labour leader, and as though he is worth fighting for – which Conservative MPs have often not felt about Cameron, leading to them airing their dirty laundry in public – then the panic in the party won’t break out beyond John Mann’s intervention today. The backbencher told Pienaar’s Politics that ‘of course it’s a warning shot and it would be naive to think otherwise. I think the message is that we need to be much

Sebastian Payne

Pension reforms are vital to encourage saving. But what about everyone else?

‘This reform is about treating people as adults’ — according to the Pensions Minister Steve Webb. The announcement of a pensions revolution in this week’s budget took everyone by surprise, leading to the question of whether there has been enough consultation on the changes. Webb said on the Sunday Politics today that evidence elsewhere shows the coalition is doing the right thing: ‘We know from around the world – places like America and Australia – where people already have this kind of freedoms. So we already have some things to judge by. We’re going to spend the next year talking to people working it through, including a three-month consultation. There

Saturday

David Blackburn

#ToryBingo could still benefit the Conservatives

Isabel and Sebastian are right: #ToryBingo is embarrassing. The advert was crass to the point of being idiotic. The use of the word ‘they’ rather than ‘you’ to describe ‘hardworking people’ was sloppy. The episode has taken some of the gloss off an otherwise shiny Budget. It is, emphatically, bad PR. That said; I don’t imagine that the Tories will be too displeased by the furore. #ToryBingo has given a huge amount of exposure to two Budget measures that would otherwise have been buried beneath the pension announcement: the Tories have cut tax on bingo and duty on beer. Neither of those measures is going to turn the next election

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Tory Wars: Backbenchers threaten backlash against Shapps backlash

There is a rather furious backlash underway against the backlash that Grant Shapps finds himself in the middle of after his bingo gaffe. Supporters of the Tory Chairman suspect he has been stitched up in some way. I understand that the graphic was emailed out to a number of tweeting MPs who all tweeted it at roughly the same time – Shapps was the first. And as Chairman, he has to take the flak. Others privately suspect that other ministers who are after his job are responsible for briefings such as this one to the Sun that he could lose his job if the Tories take a drubbing in the

Friday

Alex Massie

Ed Miliband’s speech in Scotland: Mr Pooter meets Alan Partridge

Ed Miliband has just given a quite extraordinary speech. I don’t know if it was deliberately banal or merely unfortunately dull. It was certainly stupefyingly boring. The Labour leader gave the impression that Scottish Labour’s spring conference was the very last place on earth he wished to be. I suppose you can’t blame him for that. Even so this perfunctory, cliche-stuffed flannel suggested Miliband’s heart wasn’t really in Perth today. It was a kind of “God, do I really have to go to Scotland?” kind of speech. I’m not sure Alan Partridge Meets Mr Pooter was quite the note Miliband hoped to strike. But when you start referring to Anas Sarwar

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

How food banks were shunted around government departments

It is well worth reading Paul Waugh’s interview with Iain Duncan Smith in the House Magazine for a number of reasons – not least his hint about docking child benefit in the future. But the Work and Pensions Secretary also makes an interesting comment about food banks: ‘We are not responsible for food banks, that policy area generally is Cabinet Office and so it should remain. I’m happy for people to visit food banks, I don’t have a particular problem with them.’ I’ve written before about why people visit food banks, and why even if we had a very good benefits system that paid people the right amount of money

Sebastian Payne

#ToryBingo: why politicians can’t ignore twitterstorms

The row over Grant Shapps’ bingo poster is an example of what happens when politicians assume that what goes in the Westminster bubble stays there. David Cameron and Paul Dacre may be right that ’too many tweets make a twat’ and Twitter can be a ‘phoney world’. But occasionally, one tweet can move into the real world too. As Isabel reported yesterday, Conservative HQ’s ineffectual response to the misjudged Bingo poster suggests that they hoped the anger could be contained amongst the anti-Conservative brigade, many of whom spend their days tweeting abuse to George Osborne. But the number of spoofs (a selection can be seen above) and the fury within

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Of course Labour doesn’t trust people with their money: the party made little effort to teach them about it

Labour’s response to the biggest announcement of the Budget, on pensions reform, was never going to be snappy. It would be unfair to expect an Opposition to deliver an immediate response to such a surprising and complex reform. But that’s not to say that the way the party has responded has been exemplary. They were not helped by John McTernan’s Newsnight interview on Wednesday night in which he framed the debate about the pension reforms as being about whether or not governments should trust people to manage their own money. He’s a former party adviser so he doesn’t get the lines to take (which, according to Adam Boulton, were not

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Labour’s campaign pickle

Douglas Alexander has given an interesting interview to the Independent in which he reveals that Labour has set up a team to monitor Ukip. It will go some way to reassuring those at the top of the party who, as I report in my Telegraph column this morning, are growing increasingly nervous about the party’s chances in the European elections. There have been awkward confrontations in Shadow Cabinet meetings about the party’s election strategy, and demands for something a little more tangible on the doorstep from shadow ministers from all wings of the party, and from candidates. It’s interesting that Labour is taking Ukip seriously, as some party chiefs initially

John O'Neill

George Osborne gave us a saver’s budget. Should he have bothered?

‘If you’re a saver, this budget is for you’, George Osborne said on Wednesday as he unveiled measures to let people keep more of what they save – such as combining cash and stocks-and-shares ISAs and whacking the subscription limit up to £15,000 from the 1st of July this year. But will people put their money away in savings accounts? The OBR’s latest forecasts show that the savings ratio – the percentage of households’ disposable income that they save – will fall by almost a fifth this year, and households will put away significant less than the OBR thought they would last March. [datawrapper chart=”http://cf.datawrapper.de/JjUGo/1/”] Households aren’t just not saving –

Thursday

Isabel Hardman

Labour sticks to cost-of-living attack as Budget debate rumbles on

If Ed Balls thought he could have done a better job than Ed Miliband at responding to the Budget, today he got his chance. The debate on the measures announced by George Osborne rumbles on in the House of Commons, and Ed Balls gave his speech on it this afternoon. He started by telling the Chamber that this was ‘the Chancellor’s last chance to make decisions and announce measures that will make a real difference before the general election’. Balls claimed that ‘for all [Osborne’s] boasts and complacency, the Budget did nothing to address the central reality that will define his time in office – the fact that for most

James Forsyth James Forsyth

It’s time for the state to trust adults with their own money

The changes that George Osborne announced to pensions yesterday were so big that there was always going to be a backlash. Sure enough, the IFS and various others have today voiced concerns about the scheme. The essential complaint is that if you let people take charge of their own pension pots, they might spend their money too quickly. This is an argument that George Osborne should relish taking on. Trusting people with their own money is a fundamentally Tory idea. It is also slightly absurd to suggest that people who have been diligent enough to build up a pension pot over their working life are suddenly going to become spendthrifts

Sebastian Payne

Podcast: Buying your way into the establishment and Osborne’s 2014 budget

How easy is it to buy your way into the British establishment? On this week’s View from 22 podcast, Harry Mount and journalist Ben Judah discuss whether Britain has become a bankrupt country. Why are so many Russians throwing hordes to cash to buy their way into new Britain? How are Prince Charles and Tony Blair involved? And is it a good thing that the establishment is regenerating itself? Fraser Nelson, James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman also analyse George Osborne’s fourth budget — what the announcements mean, the winners and losers, how the Chancellor has carefully targeted Ukip, the significant changes for pensioners and Ed Miliband’s meek response. Plus, Fraser

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

George Osborne’s Budget elephant trap is still open and waiting for Labour

Yesterday the Opposition didn’t really do all that much opposing. Labour announced it was going to vote in favour of George Osborne’s AME welfare cap, with Ed Balls arguing that Ed Miliband had set this out in a speech last year anyway. This cap was supposed to be an elephant trap for Labour, but Labour initially appeared to have tip-toed around the edge without falling in. But Osborne has set a secondary snare for the party: the ‘bedroom tax’. The Conservatives are keen to point out that restoring the ‘spare room subsidy’ would lead to a £465 million welfare spending rise in 2015/16, and want Labour to answer how they

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Tories: There never was a bingo poster

George Osborne got the front pages he wanted this morning. ‘A budget for Sun readers’ proclaims his target newspaper. But Labour, which doesn’t have very much to say about the Budget, has been celebrating Grant Shapps’ unfortunate infographic which he tweeted last night which takes a rather David Attenborough-style tone when describing what hardworking people like to do in their spare time. ‘Cutting the bingo tax and beer duty to help hardworking people do more of the things they enjoy’ the image says. Labour is delighted and many Tories are horrified. George Osborne has been pressed repeatedly about it on his post-Budget broadcast tour. listen to ‘George Osborne: We’re creating