Uk politics

Tory lead cut to 2 percent in 60 key marginals

One of the refrains made in response to the recent spate of opinion polls is that they don’t really capture what’s going on in the marginals – the real battlgrounds where the election will be fought.  Well, now we have a YouGov/Channel 4 poll which specifically covers 60 key marginal sets, and it provides more evidence that Labour are closing ground on the Tories.  Here are the headline figures, compared to the last marginals poll for Channel 4, a year ago: Conservatives — 39 (down 4) Labour — 37 (up 1) Lib Dems — 35 (up 2) And YouGov’s Peter Kellner provides a useful explanation of what they mean: “The

Ashcroft in the clear?<br />

The Beeb were reporting it an hour or so ago, but now it’s been confirmed: the Electoral Commission has cleared the Tories and Lord Ashcroft of any wrongdoing over £5.1 million worth of donations from his company, Bearwood Corporate Services Limited.  Sure, there are still questions surrounding this whole affair – most of them to do with the Tories’ naivety in their handling of it.  But you suspect that this announcement will draw some of the political poison out of proceedings.  Not that that will stop Harriet Harman or her colleagues in the Labour party… UPDATE: Channel 4’s Cathy Newman is reporting that David Cameron only knew about Ashcroft’s non-dom

Available from all good bookshops…

… this September: Tony Blair’s memoirs, entititled The Journey.  Question is, what does this say about his hopes for a Labour victory?  Or will all the juicy Blarite-Brownite stuff be cut out?  Either way, the cover will be what you see on the left.

Britain on the brink

It is a calculation that should fill all of us with an immense sense of dread: there is now a 72.2 percent chance of a hung parliament. Or so says Michael Saunders, Citigroup’s chief European economist and the one man in the City everybody listens to when it comes to the interaction between parliamentary politics and the financial markets. His model, which incorporates the standard data about the Westminster first-past-the post system, and into which he has fed all of the latest polls, also suggests that there is just a 6.2 percent chance of strong Tory majority, a 19.1 percent chance of a weak one and 2.5 percent chance of

Turning welfare into work

Contrary to what you might think, it is actually quite hard to find someone on benefits who doesn’t want to work. When you ask a claimant whether they would like to, they will invariably say “Yes, I want a job.” At first, this seems like a strange answer: why do we have nearly 6 million people on benefits when so many of them want to work? The answer is simple when you ask a few more questions: they don’t want just any job. They envisage doing what they used to do or would like to try – but aren’t willing to look for anything else. Getting them to try any

Michael Foot, 1913 – 2010

The former Labour leader Michael Foot died today, aged 96.  A man whose politics I doubt many CoffeeHousers will share, and whose period in charge of the Labour party might not be remembered with much fondness by those who do.  But his commitment, integrity and intelligence still stand as a bright, clear example to politicians today.  I’d recommend you read the warm and thoughful tributes from Tom Harris, Jon Snow, Dan Hannan, Sunder Katwala and Alastair Campbell, among others.

PMQs live blog | 3 March 2010

Stay tuned for live coverage from 1200. 1201: And here we go.  Obviously, with Brown meeting Zuma, it’s the deputies today. Harman starts with condolences for the fallen. 1202: Incidentally, Cameron is being interviewed on TalkSport radio, if you want to listen to that. 1203: First question: why manufacturing has fallen under Labour. Harman says that this is the Tories “talking the country down”. Hm. Easier than actually answering the question, I suppose… 1204: This PMQs is already getting noisily partisan.  A second question brings some “do nothing Tories” innuendo from Harman.  Jeers and cheers all round. 1206: Hague now.  His first question is whether Brown was wrong to cut

James Forsyth

Labour will relish this opportunity to prolong the Ashcroft story

When Gordon Brown pulled out of PMQs this week because of Jacob Zuma’s state visit there was much chortling that he didn’t much fancy PMQs. But I suspect that Labour is rather glad that William Hague is up today; no Tory politician is more central to the Ashcroft peerage than Hague, and Hague’s appearance at the despatch box is Labour’s best chance of taking this story into a third day. Hague will have his line that Ashcroft would pay ‘tens of millions a year in tax’ thrown back at him repeatedly. Hague’s trips with Ashcroft to various foreign locales will also get an outing. There is something incredibly frustrating about

Fraser Nelson

Facing the protesters

Given that school choice will only benefit those who cannot afford it at present, who could be against it? The answer is the Socialist Educational Alliance, who have decided to stage a protest at The Spectator’s conference on school liberalisation on Thursday. They have produced a leaflet (see left, and click to enlarge). “Bring your whistles and drums” it says – 8.30am. I wonder if Ed Balls will join them, as he appears to agree with the thrust of their argument. “Defend democratic accountability,” says the flier. This is the language which Labour left use: “democratic accountability” is code, of course, for political/bureaucratic control. Perhaps my friend Polly Toynbee will

Why the Tories should talk about immigration

Should the Tories talk about immigration? This will bring back a lot of bad memories for the modernisers, who believe that this hurt them in 2005. But, as Tim Montgomerie says over at CiF today, the picture has transformed since then. The total number of immigrant workers has risen 25 per cent, to 3.5 million. And nationally, immigrants now make up a remarkable 15 percent of the workforce (see graph below) – which puts us up there with America. Except our immigration is handled in a haphazard way that creates plenty of bad feeling. Talk to a Tory candidate and they will say there’s only one issue that gets cut-through

Is this the closest that Brown’s government has come to a <em>mea culpa</em>?

A striking passage from Peter Mandelson’s speech at Mansion House last night: “Starting in the 1980s we allowed the diversity of the British economy – or lack of it – to approach the limits of what was prudent. Sometimes there was an economic fatalism about manufacturing decline and falling British goods exports, rather than seeing them as something that policy and private enterprise should address. Our economy, and certainly our corporate tax base, became too dependent on the City. We were also carrying a huge hidden insurance liability for a sector that was taking badly understood and inadequately policed risks.” Yes, I know Mandelson takes things back to the 1980s

Labour’s pursuit of Ashcroft could backfire

I wrote yesterday that Lord Ashcroft’s statement about his tax status should have drawn a “rather neat line under the issue”.  Sure, it’s hardly ideal that someone with such influence in our politics hasn’t been paying UK taxes on much of his wealth (something which could equally be said of Labour donors like Lord Paul and Lakshmi Mittal), and was keeping mysterious about it.  But at least, now, most of the uncertainty surrounding Ashcroft’s position has been removed.  And we have his indication that he will become a full UK taxpayer in due course.   But I hadn’t counted on the tenacity of Labour, who are trying to spin this

Who should be the Tory attack dog?

A persuasive passage (complete with a spiky, ministerial quote – highlighted) from Rachel Sylvester’s column this morning: “There is growing concern among some Shadow Cabinet ministers and strategists about the increasingly aggressive tone Mr Cameron uses against Mr Brown. It is, they believe, no coincidence that the poll gap has narrowed as the Tory leader launches a series of increasingly vitriolic personal attacks on the Prime Minister. Last week, for example, by turning the bully into the victim, Mr Cameron seems to have simply solidified support for Mr Brown. There was a similar backlash to the Conservatives’ misleading ‘death tax’ poster campaign. Although ministers admit privately that ‘even I couldn’t

Brown goes crime-fighting<br />

Yeah, I know: 4,500 words of Brown’s rhetoric is too much for most CoffeeHousers to bear.  So I thought I’d read his “speech on crime and anti-social behaviour” on your behalf, and highlight three things which jumped out at me.  Here goes: 1. Taking on the Tories over DNA retention. Paul Waugh has already blogged on what may turn out to be the most significant passage of Brown’s speech – at least so far as the cut ‘n’ thrust of the election campaign is concerned.  In it, Brown highlights the case of Jeremiah Sheridan, who raped a woman some 19 years ago, but was caught last year thanks to DNA

James Forsyth

Are the Tories over the worst of the wobble?

We are expecting at least one poll tonight, the YouGov tracker, and I think there will be one other. If these polls show the Tories ahead by six—a level that just last week was seen as rather disappointing—they will add to the sense that the Tories are over the worst of the wobble. Significantly, the Lord Ashcroft story, an irritating one for the party and particularly so today, is not being depicted as part of a Tories in crisis story. (One does wonder why Ashcroft didn’t choose to get the news out earlier after the Information Commissioner ruled at the beginning of February that the Cabinet Office should reveal what

Market tremors

Forget the polls, the markets should be enough to give any of us a sharp dose of The Fear.  Exhibit A: Sterling, which has slumped below $1.50 today, for the first time in nine months, and on the back of what analyists are calling “deficit worries”.  And Exhibit B: the UK Gilt markets, where rising interest rates suggest that investors are rapidly losing confidence in Britain’s ability to pay back its debt, just as Coffee House’s Mark Bathgate warned a few months back.  Check out the FT for the full story. Of course, I say “forget the the polls” – but this is all very poll-related.  The possiblity of a