Uk politics

Sunday

Sebastian Payne

Labour conference: Sunday fringe guide

Every morning throughout party conference season, we’ll be providing our pick of the fringe events on Coffee House.  Today is the first day of Labour’s annual conference in Brighton. The conference officially kicks off at 11:00am and there are plenty of interesting fringes with shadow cabinet members, trade unionists and prominent party figures around the main speeches : Title Key speaker(s) Time Location Chuka Umunna in conversation with the New Statesman Chuka Umunna 12:30 Tennyson, Thistle Hotel Real Britain – battling austerity and Con-Dem cuts Len McCluskey 12:30 Alexandra Room, De Vere Grand Hotel Road to full employment Liam Byrne 12:30 Norfolk Suite, Mercure Hotel Lessons from Germany’s low carbon

Saturday

James Forsyth

Three reasons why you can’t write off Ed Miliband

This is not the backdrop that Ed Miliband would have wanted for Labour conference. Labour’s poll lead has—according to YouGov—vanished, Damian McBride is dominating the news agenda and there’s talk of splits and division in this inner circle. But, as I say in the cover this week, you can’t write Ed Miliband off yet. He has three huge, structural advantages in his favour. The boundaries favour Labour: Type Thursday’s YouGov poll, the best for the Tories in 18 months, into UK Polling Report’s seat calculator, and it tells you that Labour would be three short of a majority on these numbers. It is a reminder that if the parties are

Friday

Isabel Hardman

Godfrey Bloom loses Ukip whip after ‘slut’ comments and hitting a journalist

‘Your day will come,’ said Godfrey Bloom rather threateningly to David Cameron by way of ending his speech to the Ukip conference. Unfortunately for Bloom, his day came a lot sooner. Just a couple of hours later, in fact. Nigel Farage has announced that the Ukip whip has been removed from the outspoken MEP: listen to ‘Nigel Farage: “Godfrey has gone beyond the pale and I think we have no option but to remove the whip”’ on Audioboo

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Godfrey Bloom, Ukip anti-hero

Debate the relative merits of the two speeches from Nigel Farage and Paul Nuttall all you like, but the headline from today’s Ukip conference won’t give voters any impression that the party has grown up at all. Godfrey Bloom (who I’ve had my own run-in with before) decided to turn up to a fringe on women in politics and start talking about ‘sluts’. He admitted as much later (audio clip below). listen to ‘Godfrey Bloom admits calling women ‘sluts’ at UKIP 2013 Conference’ on Audioboo

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Ukip conference: Paul Nuttall, a very different Ukipper, appeals to the Labour vote

Even if Nigel Farage’s speech was, as Fraser blogged earlier, a wasted opportunity for the Ukip leader to impress the voters that he really needs to attract, it still pleased the members in the hall. In fact, there was more of an excited, energetic atmosphere at this conference than at any party political conference I’ve ever attended. When I interviewed Nadine Dorries for the magazine earlier this year, she recalled the dying Tory government in 1997, saying that ‘[Voters] hated us because the Labour party promise, the vision, the song “Things Can Only Get Better” had a purchase on people’s imagination, and in their hearts that I see being replicated

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Damian McBride and today’s Downing Street spin operation

Damian McBride’s memoirs will naturally make uncomfortable reading for the Labour party, but the current occupants of Downing Street will also be feasting on his lesson in the dark arts, and wondering if there is anything they can take from it too. This sounds like an odd thing to say when so much condemnation for the poisoned operation of the Brownites (and, as Peter Oborne points out, the operation around Blair too) is flying about today. But the question of whether the current government needs its own Damian McBride is one that has occupied Tory MPs who like to think about these things for a while. In February, when McBride

Sebastian Payne

The View from 22 special: the airport conundrum: is competition the key?

In association with Gatwick Airport Does Britain really need a new airport, or simply more competition between existing ones? In this special View from 22 podcast, the Spectator’s editor Fraser Nelson discusses whether the current and future patterns of air travel mean Britain needs a new airport at all, the pros and cons of various expansion options, which option would see the best deal for passengers and the importance of air travel to economic growth. Joining the panel are Stewart Wingate, CEO of Gatwick Airport, Margot James, the Conservative MP for Stourbridge and member of the No.10 policy unit, and Eamonn Butler, director and co-founder of the Adam Smith Institute. You

James Forsyth James Forsyth

How McBride dripped poison into the system

If you want to know why Damian McBride was such a feared figure in Whitehall, read the section in his memoirs about how he sowed division between Charles Clarke, then the Home Secretary, and Louise Casey, the anti-social behaviour tsar. McBride’s approach was far more cunning than straight negative briefings or leaks. Rather, he went through the government grid looking for announcements in this policy area and then briefed them out to the papers in a way that made it sound like it had come from either Clarke or Casey’s teams. The result was that both sides became convinced that the other was trying to take all the credit for what

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Finally – Damian McBride provides the Labour confession we’ve been waiting for

‘Drug use; spousal abuse; secret alcoholism; extra-marital affairs. I estimate I did nothing with 95 per cent of the stories I was told. But, yes, some of them ended up on the front pages of Sunday newspapers.’ And with this starts the serialisation of what will be perhaps the most explosive book about British politics for ten years. Damian McBride’s memoirs look every bit as good as I had hoped. The Daily Mail serialisation today gives a taste of what should really be called ‘confessions of a political hit man’ – the methods and motives of Team Brown, perhaps most ruthless and effective bunch of character assassins that Westminster has ever

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Damian McBride’s confessions part I

Ever since the publication date of Damian McBride’s book was set for the week of the Labour autumn conference, it was clear that the party would find itself lugging a bit of the past around as it tries to talk about what it wants to do in the future. But perhaps it wasn’t clear quite what a festival of letting skeletons wander out of closets this week would be. There isn’t one particularly horrifying skeleton, but the effect both of McBride’s book, serialised in the Mail, and the cache of emails released by Benjamin Wegg-Prosser, former Number 10 strategic communications director, is to trawl up a row that had lain

Thursday

Max Hastings

Max Hastings’ diary: I love the British Army (but not the Blackadder version of it)

The looming centenary of the outbreak of the first world war offers an opportunity to break away from the Blackadder/Oh! What a Lovely War vision, which dominates popular perceptions. Nobody sane suggests a celebration. But, in place of the government’s professed ‘non-judgmental’ approach to commemoration, ministers could assert that although the war was assuredly ghastly, it was not futile. Whatever the shortcomings of the Treaty of Versailles, a peace imposed by a victorious Germany would have been much worse. David Cameron often mentions with pride Britain’s role in resisting Hitler. In 2014, it would be good to hear him acknowledge that Britain, and those who died in her name, were

Toby Young Toby Young

Why I want my schools to ban the burka (and the miniskirt)

For most people, the question of whether to ban the burka is a purely theoretical one. Not for me. As the chairman of a charitable trust that sits above two schools, it’s something I’m obliged to consider. Usually, the heads of the schools fight tooth and nail to preserve their autonomy, claiming that such and such an issue is an ‘operational’ matter and therefore none of my beeswax. But in this case, they’re happy to kick the decision upstairs. It’s not a matter for me alone, but for the trust’s board of directors, of which I’m only one. And I can’t predict how the board will vote. Nevertheless, I will

Camilla Swift Camilla Swift

Piggies in the middle: why we need to have confidence in our food labelling systems

Just 9 months after the horsemeat scandal revealed that products labelled as beef did, in fact, contain horsemeat, one might have expected the food standards authority to have cracked down on food labelling – particularly when it comes to meat. But in an investigation broadcast earlier this week by the BBC’s Farming Today programme, a reporter bought a pork chop ‘at random’ from Tesco. It was labelled with the ‘Red Tractor’ logo, which ought to mean that it ‘is fully traceable back to independently inspected farms in the UK’. However, lab tests showed that the meat probably came from a Dutch farm – in fact there’s less than a 1%

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Tory MPs hold away day on strategy, policy, and general knowledge

Tory MPs are currently heading off to Oxfordshire for an away day. But the Tory leadership is keen to emphasise that this isn’t just another BBQ-style event. There will, they say, be a substantial policy element to it as well which could make things interesting as regular rebels Sarah Wollaston, Adam Afriyie and Peter Bone will all be in attendance. George Osborne, Theresa May and Jeremy Hunt will all hold policy surgeries. Backbenchers will be invited to offer their views on what the government should be thinking about doing in all these areas. They’ll also be presentations on the media environment by Craig Oliver and the new Number 10 press

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Coalition with Labour would suffocate the Liberal Democrats

I write this in Glasgow, at the Lib Dem conference. Nick Clegg has invented a constitutional doctrine. The doctrine teaches that after a general election, the party that comes third (should it have cohabitation in mind) must first approach the party that won the most seats. But there is no such rule. Our unwritten constitution is clear, minimal and simple. Any two parties jointly capable of commanding a Commons majority have an effective right to form a government together whenever they wish. That right is born of their joint ability to bring down any other government on the instant. So after the general election in 2015, unguided by the rule

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman

Lib Dem conference: Five takeaway lessons

1. The Lib Dems think they will be in power again after 2015 This whole conference was aimed at making that easy by encouraging activists to back grown-up policies rather than argue about goldfish. The Lib Dem leader placed great emphasis in his speech on his party’s ability to work with any party, arguing that it didn’t matter who he got on with better personally. As James writes, the Lib Dems had a good conference because they think there will be another hung parliament. 2. The Lib Dems believe in coalition more than they believe in anything else. Clegg’s ‘this-is-who-I-am’ passages in his speech explained his frustration with two-party politics,

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Lib Dem conference: Dr No tells party activists that he loves blocking popular policies

Nick Clegg’s speech was supposed to be about how the Lib Dems are the modifying party. They stop the nasty Tories doing lots of nasty things, and under different circumstances, they’d stop Labour being incompetent. The text of the speech suggests that Clegg is trying to say that what the Lib Dems stand for more than anything else is better government: that is, government that doesn’t do mean or incompetent things (both of which are judged by the moral compass of the junior coalition partner, of course). He closed his speech by saying: ‘In the past the Liberal Democrats would eke out an existence on the margins of British politics.

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Lib Dem conference: Why Nick Clegg gave a personal speech

Why did Nick Clegg choose to give ‘his most personal speech so far’ at this year’s autumn conference? Ed Miliband, after all, has been giving these speeches for three years now, each apparently more personal than the last. And Clegg doesn’t really have any more compelling a story than anyone else in Westminster: like Miliband, his parents have a fascinating story to tell, but his own upbringing has been pretty standard for a politician. But this conference was the first opportunity Clegg has really had to market himself because for a few years his reputation was so toxic in the country, and the decision he had taken to go into

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Lib Dem conference: It is Nick Clegg’s party now

There has always been a sense that Nick Clegg and his coterie have been separate from the rest of the Liberal Democrats. They were more hard-headed in their politics, more professional in their approach and more ambitious for power. But every year of Clegg’s leadership, the party becomes more like the leader. This conference, the Cleggites have been in the ascendant in the hall and on the fringe. The leadership has won every important vote, the activists have happily engaged in surprisingly non-ideological discussions about future coalitions and there has been far less hand-wringing about the compromises of power. In the first years of the coalition, speaker after speaker would

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Free school meals plan shows Lib Dems have a tortured view of the state

There’s plenty of fun to be had with the Lib Dems’ decision to give all infant school children free school meals. Firstly there are the letters from MPs like Simon Hughes slating the policy (the Southwark MP told constituents that his local council was ‘spending £15 million giving free school meals, some of this going to the borough’s richest families, irrespective of whether they can afford to pay for them already’). And then there’s the fact that the party has attacked universalism on a number of other fronts, most notably the winter fuel payment, which Nick Clegg and colleagues say is a waste of money as it goes to rich