Uk politics

Sometimes what doesn’t occasion interest or drama or controversy is more interesting – or at least more telling – than what does. So perhaps it is a tribute to the extent to which Nigel Farage and UKIP are now entrenched in the body politic that Farage’s speech to the party’s latest conference appears, as best I can tell, to have been treated as just another routine appearance by just another politician. Move along now, not a lot to see here. Not much news, not many dead. That is, the reaction has been There he goes again. We know Farage’s thing these days and it no longer shocks or even, I

Is it really possible for the Tories to win a majority in 2015 after five years in government? Perhaps they need to look at the Conservatives in Canada, who won their majority in the 2011 elections after two elections where they won a minority government. But the way the party won this majority was partly down to its active courting of the New Canadians – new migrants to the country from al over the world. Canada’s largest city, Toronto is probably the most diverse in the world, with half of its population from ‘visible minorities’. New Canadians tended to be supporters of the centre-left Liberal Party until a few years

Nigel Farage likes to argue he’s not a normal politician. He says what he thinks and what other people think too. He certainly didn’t do what other politicians are trying to do ahead of the European elections, which is expectation management. Instead, he set the bar pretty darn high for Ukip, telling his party’s spring conference in Torquay that ‘we can cause an earthquake on May 22nd by winning the European elections’, adding ‘if we top those polls, it will then give us the momentum to drive us forward to the general election a year after that’. He has set Ukip a big challenge there because if the party doesn’t

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_27_February_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman on why the two party political system is dying” startat=1207] Listen [/audioplayer]Two things will make the next general election campaign quite unlike any previous election in this country. The first is that we now have four-party politics right across Britain. In Scotland and Wales, the nationalist parties have been a political force for a generation. But the big change is in England, where Ukip is emerging as a fourth force. Second, the campaign will be haunted by the spectre of another hung parliament. The question of what happens if no party wins an overall majority will be asked time and time again by

The Coalition is merely cohabiting now – that much has been clear for a while. But one partner doesn’t seem to acknowledge quite how unreasonable its behaviour is. The Lib Dems have been cheesing off the Tories with what have appeared to be an increasing number of increasingly heated attacks: from David Laws wading into the Ofsted row to Ed Davey attacking ‘diabolical’ and ‘wilfully ignorant’ Tories, and from even ‘native’ Danny Alexander making dire (but specific) threats about his dead body and taxation to Nick Clegg describing George Osborne’s call for further cuts in welfare spending after 2015 as a ‘monumental’ mistake. But today at his monthly press conference,

Introducing House of Cards, Westminster redux. Many thanks to all the politicians who took part.