Uk politics

Sunday

Sebastian Payne

Lib Dem conference: Ed Davey says he’s ‘not for turning’ on a green future

Though it was never going to make the earth move, Ed Davey’s speech to the Liberal Democrat conference highlighted the party’s push for differentiation on the green agenda. The Energy and Climate Change Secretary was clear that installing Owen Paterson, as the new Environment Secretary, would not stop the Lib Dems fighting for a green future and a green economy. ‘Our Coalition agreement to clear up Britain’s mess, wasn’t an agreement to turn the clock back. For business as usual. To rekindle Thatcherism – or Blair-Brown. It was for a fairer, greener Britain – and we must fight for that. Earlier today, I moved the motion to pledge this party’s

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Lib Dem conference: Tim Farron keeps it muted

Tim Farron’s speech to this year’s autumn conference was rather muted compared to his effort in Birmingham last year. The Liberal Democrat president did take the opportunity to attack both Labour and the Tories, of course, because that is his job, but he did not talk about Conservatives speaking ‘drivel’, or about divorces. He described Labour’s record in government as ’13 years of a Labour government: what a mandate, what a disappointment’, and delivered the obligatory Liberal Democrat attack on the banks. But other than praising Nick Clegg for preventing a majority Conservative government in the 2010 election, his overt criticism of the Tories was limited to a list of

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Lib Dem conference: Clegg will accept further welfare cuts but wants to squeeze rich more

The opening act of any party conference is the interview for Sunday morning TV and Nick Clegg made clear to Andrew Marr that the welfare budget is ‘not immune from further savings.’ He also said that he was confident that he could persuade the Tories to agree to further ways to make the ‘rich’ pay more. But under pressure from Marr, he couldn’t provide any details on what form this new tax might take. In an attempt to damp down the continuing chatter about Vince Cable’s conversations with Ed Miliband, Clegg said that he was in regular touch with both Milibands, Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson. But as long as

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Coffee House Interview: David Hall-Matthews calls for Clegg to ‘get smarter’ at coalition

David Hall-Matthews is the chair of the left-leaning grassroots grouping within the Liberal Democrats, the Social Liberal Forum. He explains his qualms about the way Nick Clegg is currently handling the coalition relationship to Coffee House readers, and calls on ministers to be bolder in calling for ‘adjustments’ to the government’s economic policy.   As the coalition agreement was hammered out between the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives in May 2010, the grassroots machinery in the party was swiftly cranking to life. Four leading members of the Social Liberal Forum, then just a small group within the party comprising over a hundred members, raced to London to discuss their strategy

Saturday

James Forsyth

Rallying the Liberal Democrat faithful

One of the striking features of the opening rally at Liberal Democrat conference was how it was figures from the left of the party who attacked Labour most vigorously. Simon Hughes, the deputy leader, scolded those who think that governing with Labour would be easy; pointing out that the parties are at odds on nuclear power, Trident, civil liberties and a whole host of other issues. While the party’s president Tim Farron demanded that Labour apologise for the expensive failure of the NHS PFI projects, the Iraq war and a whole host of other issues. Nick Clegg himself was on fairly confident form. He began with a couple of gags

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Don’t expect Nick Clegg to throw too many rocks at the Tories in Brighton

The Lib Dem round of pre-conference interviews today shows where the party wants to look distinctive. It is tax ‘fairness’, greenery and social mobility on which it has decided to set its stall. One thing worth noting, though, is that Nick Clegg’s interview in The Independent does not rule out future welfare cuts. He tells Andy Grice that ‘We are not going to do an across-the-board, two-year freeze of all benefits during this parliament’. This leaves the Liberal Democrats plenty of room for manoeuvre ahead of the autumn statement on December 5th. I expect that we won’t hear too much bashing of his coalition partners from the deputy Prime Minister

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

David Laws to announce increase in pupil premium

The first minister up on the stage at the Liberal Democrat conference this afternoon is new education minister David Laws. He has an announcement which will please those in the audience: the party’s flagship pupil premium will increase from £600 to £900 per child. This is what he is expected to say: ‘I can announce today that next year the Pupil Premium will increase again. It will rise from £600 to £900 per child. Last year it paid for over 1.8 million pupils. Just think what we have done with that policy. A secondary school with 1,000 pupils, a third on the Pupil Premium, will be receiving around an extra

Friday

Melanie McDonagh

Andrew Mitchell’s Gate-gate: haven’t we all been there?

All right, he’s eaten dirt. Andrew Mitchell, Chief Whip, has now apologised to the Prime Minister and apologised profusely to the policeman he may or may not have called a pleb. In a statement today – prudently, he declined offers of radio interviews – Mitchell admitted that he ‘did not treat the police with the respect they deserve’ when on Wednesday evening one of them refused to allow him to ride his bicycle out of the Downing Street gate and directed him instead to the pedestrian one. In the outburst that followed, he is said to have told the man that he didn’t run the government. Well, that makes two

Andrew Watts

Alex Salmond’s wind farm delusion

Last year, in an interview with the Today programme, the chief executive of National Grid told the show’s no doubt stunned listeners that they would have to get used to not having electricity as and when they wanted it. That here in the developed world we should be wondering whether the lights will be going out in a few years time, whether our children will go to bed in the cold or whether we will spend our evenings shivering around log fires is rather amazing. That our political leaders have achieved this — if achieved is the right word — in the face of the shale gas revolution with its

Jonathan Jones

Borrowing figures are good and bad news for the government

Today’s public finance statistics are another case of good news/bad news for the government. First, the good news: the ONS revised down its estimate for government borrowing in the last fiscal year (2011/12) from £125 billion to £119.3 billion. That’s £6.7 billion below the OBR’s estimate in March this year, and means that the coalition succeeded in cutting the deficit by 25 per cent in its first two years (29 per cent in real terms). But the bad news comes when you look at the current fiscal year. The ONS estimates government borrowing for August at £14.41 billion — roughly the same as August 2011 (£14.37 billion). These estimates do

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Nigel Farage’s real strategy

Nigel Farage’s very public willingness to explore a UKIP-Tory electoral pact in exchange for a pledge from David Cameron to hold a referendum on EU membership is, I suspect, designed to achieve two things. First, it is meant to flush out Cameron. If Cameron declines the offer, Farage will be able to claim that only UKIP are the only party to vote for if you want an In/Out choice on the UK’s EU membership. It’ll undercut the Tory offer of a renegotiation referendum. Second, by floating the offer he makes it more likely that individual Tory MPs and candidates might sign up to the offer themselves, pledging to back an

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The death of the party conference

The party conference season is now underway, with Lib Dems gathering in Brighton. It’s time to admit that our political parties are in a bad way, and this has nothing to do with voter apathy. Britain’s political culture is bursting with life, it’s the parties that are dying. This will be horribly apparent in the conferences. David Cameron couldn’t even fill the hall for his speech last year, the first time in living memory that this happened. This is no reflection on his (usually excellent) speeches but the decay of conferences in general. Since they moved to the cities, they became geared at those with expense accounts rather than membership

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Thrasher Mitchell’s toxic tirade

Andrew Mitchell spent two years detoxifying his image at the International Development department, wearing charity wristbands and talking about polio vaccines. But however much success he enjoyed in creating a persona of a reasonable, mild-mannered man concerned with poverty (and our leading article this week disputes whether the programmes he led were anywhere near as successful as that), the man known as ‘Thrasher’ trashed that reputation this week. The Sun reports that he raged ‘You’re f***ing plebs’ at policemen who had the temerity to stop him from cycling out of the Downing Street gates. His tirade allegedly included him repeatedly telling the police officers that he was the chief whip,

Steerpike Steerpike

Telling tales: some infamous conference moments

What could possibly go wrong when you lock 10,000 political hacks and flacks in a hotel for 96 hours and let lobbyists pick up the tab? Well that’s party conference for you, and there have been some excellent tales of drunken debauchery over the last few years. The most riotous parties are the ones upstairs in the private suites of the main conference hotel. Representing the Tory side, Lord Strathclyde fills his bathtub with ice and champagne and opens his doors every year. Rumour has it that he always deserves a magnum for later. Last year, one Tory MP went so far as to punch a colleague. Other MPs had to drag one of them away. It was  all denials

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Farage’s floundering highlights Cameron’s EU challenge

By the end of his 8.10 interview on the Today programme, Nigel Farage was struggling a little. Once John Humphrys had taken him away from his hobby horse of a European Union Referendum, the UKIP leader started to wobble. Humphrys: Let’s have a look at your policies. A bit puzzling, in a way, and it’s not the first time a political leader has done this. You seem to want to cut back taxes, you want to roll back the state, and yet, you want to spend loads of money on loads of things. Farage: Well, we want to spend more money on defence, that is absolutely true, and we think,

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Burstow goes rogue to attack Treasury

Hell hath no fury like a government minister sacked (as proven by our anonymous ‘Dumped by Dave’ piece this week). Another former minister, Paul Burstow, lost his job because Nick Clegg was miffed at the way the Lib Dem had failed to flag up the dangers in the Health and Social Care Bill. He’d already formed a habit of briefing against his own department when he was in office, so it’s no great shock that Burstow has decided to dish the dirt on the Treasury in the Telegraph today, claiming it is responsible for blocking reform of the social care system. He writes: ‘Of course, if fixing this was easy

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Coffee House Interview: Chris Skidmore on Britannia Unchained, ‘lazy’ Brits, and how the government should be unpopular

Before it had even appeared in reviewers’ postbags, the book that Chris Skidmore co-authored with four other Conservative MPs had created quite a stir in Westminster. ‘Brits so lazy’, said the Sun, about a chapter in Britannia Unchained which describes the British as being ‘among the worst idlers in the world’. That claim provoked rage from left-wingers, with Labour’s Chuka Umunna calling on David Cameron to ‘distance himself’ from the comments, which he said were ‘deeply insulting’. But Skidmore seems entirely unperturbed by the outcry. In fact, when we meet in his Westminster office, he seems quite taken with the idea that politicians should take a great deal of unpopularity

Alex Massie Alex Massie

John Swinney misses a trick – Spectator Blogs

There are days when Scottish independence seems a more than decent idea. Budget day at Holyrood is always one of them. I say budget day but it’s really faux-budget day because, at least until now, it’s always been only half a budget. A parliament that may spend but cannot tax is only half a parliament. So, if not independence then proper fiscal autonomy at least. That would make Holyrood a better, bigger, more responsible place. It might also provide incentives for better public policy. Might being the operative word, obviously. Nevertheless the reaction to the so-called budget John Swinney delivered yesterday has been encouraging. That is, the public sector unions

Sebastian Payne

Can UKIP become a serious political party?

UKIP members are gathering for their annual conference in Birmingham today and frustratingly for the party, it remains a niche political event. Unlike the media explosion for the other three political gatherings, UKIP’s two day rally will have no wall-to-wall TV coverage and little in-depth analysis of the speeches. But since Nigel Farage gathered his flock last year, Britain’s other party has seen its profile raised substantially. Martin Kettle admitted in the Guardian this week that UKIP are now a ‘force to be reckoned with’ who could become kingmakers that will ‘shape the 2015 election and the politics of Britain and Europe for a generation’. Polling suggests they are indeed a significant political

Thursday

James Forsyth

A blast of common sense on social media censorship

Munira Mirza, Boris Johnson’s deputy mayor for education and culture, provides a much needed blast of common sense in today’s Evening Standard. She says that the police, and society, need to calm down about people making idiotic and offensive comments on Twitter and other social media sites. As she points out, ‘Do the police have nothing better to do than patrol Twitter, hunting out people who send tasteless tweets?’ But there’s another reason to worry about this policing beyond the fact that it is a waste of resources: the more we race around arresting people for saying stupid things or things that go against the current orthodoxy, the less free