Conservative party

Wednesday

James Forsyth

Brown’s bonus smokescreen

If today ends up with the government in a row with the City over plans to tax bank bonus pots with bankers threatening to take the government to court, then it will be mission accomplished for the Labour party. The same goes if we end up in a debate over the merits of a Tobin-style tax. For obvious reasons, Labour would rather talk about anything other than the state of the public finances so anything that distracts attention from that central question is, to use the word of the morning, a bonus for Brown. The Tories know this and will try and turn the debate back to the public finances and the fact that Britain was the first major economy into recession and is going to be the last out. It is imperative for them that they succeed.

Tuesday

Peter Hoskin

Clocking on

As publicity stunts go, the debt clock the Tories beamed onto Battersea Power Station this evening is quite a decent idea.  Their thinking's pretty clear – get some coverage in tomorrow's papers, and increase the likelihood that the horrendous state of the public finances becomes the story of the PBR – but it's probably no less effective for it.  Anyway, here are some pictures so you can judge for yourself: P.S. Yes, I know it's out of sync with the Coffee House debt counter. We're going to update our numbers on the back of tomorrow's PBR.

James Forsyth

Tomorrow could be a turning point for the Tories

The number of polls showing the Tories below forty percent are causing some heartburn for the Tory leadership. When the first poll came out showing the Tory lead down, there was a feeling that this wasn’t all bad, that it would help remind the party that the election isn’t in the bag. But there is now mounting concern at Tory slippage, this is being reinforced by the fact that the party’s own research shows the same trends. Today’s leader in The Times, a paper which is normally editorially supportive of the leadership, was another unhelpful development.

David Blackburn

A significant endorsement for Osborne and Hammond

Bernard Gray, a member of the Tories’ Public Service Productivity Advisory Committee, explains why he has joined forces with the Tories. He writes in today’s Times: ‘From my experience of working in and with the Ministry of Defence over the past decade I know how strong such vested interests are and how much commitment is required to overcome resistance to change. It will take acts of extraordinary political will to take on these entrenched interests. The Shadow Treasury team, George Osborne and Philip Hammond, have persuaded me that they are have the determination, drive and belief in change to tackle this issue at this critical time. That’s why I’ve been persuaded to help them.

Monday

Peter Hoskin

When did the Tories become an “alternative government”?

There are a couple of noteworthy snippets in today's FT interview with George Osborne: the claim that the Tories may not take corporation tax as low as it is in Ireland; the outline of a "five-year road map" on business tax policy, etc.  But, I must admit, it's this passage which jumped out at me:    "[Osborne] says his Tory conference speech in October, which included plans for a public sector pay freeze and an increase in the state retirement age, 'was an important moment' that showed a mental leap to being 'an alternative government, not just an opposition'." These self-bestowed titles – "alternative government," and the like – are silly, really.  The only thing that actually matters is whom the public regards as governing material.

James Forsyth

An efficient response 

Both parties want to be seen as the party of public sector efficiency. The Tories want to be able to show that they can do more with less and that cuts therefore need not mean worse services. While Labour wants to contrast their supposedly ‘smart cuts’ with the Tories’ ‘hatchet approach.’   So, this morning we had Gordon Brown delivering a speech outlining how the government would save £12 billion over the next three years; many of the policies he proposed were rather familiar to those of us who have been listening to the Tories on this subject.  The Tories then tried to trump Brown’s speech by announcing the formation of a Public Services Productivity Advisory Board.

Peter Hoskin

This week’s PBR looks set to be Brown’s most political Budget yet

Ok, so all Brown Budgets are political – but signs are that this week's PBR could be his most blatantly partisan yet.  I mean, just look at his speech this morning on improving efficiency in the public sector.  Some of its measures are welcome – for instance, pledging to cut the pay of senior servants, and the general idea of using technology more effectively in government.  But, as other folk have pointed out (see Guido and Iain Dale), the measures are insufficient to the scale of the debt crisis, and many are old news.  All in all, the signs are as we expected: Brown is paying only lip service to cuts. Instead, Brown is going to go heavy on soak-the-rich measures; thereby strengthening what Labour see as two dividing lines.

James Forsyth

The politics of distraction

If everyone concentrates on the actual numbers in the PBR then it will be a disaster for Labour. So, instead Labour will try and distract us all with small but eye-catching measures — a new rate of inheritance tax for estates worth more than £5 million, that kind of thing. The aim will be to move the debate from the grim reality of the country’s fiscal situation to Labour’s dividing lines. There will be a lot of pressure on Cameron and Osborne to denounce Labour’s soak the rich measures. But the most important thing for them to do is to get the debate back to the state of the public finances and that is inevitably going to involve side-stepping the arguments that Brown wants to pick.

David Blackburn

Cameron and Ashcroft should come clean

David Cameron’s ‘nothing to do with me guv’ response to the Ashcroft tax question on yesterday’s Politics Show has not put the issue to bed. In fact, his obfuscation has the reverse effect. The Independent runs an article today describing how little is known about individuals and authorities. ‘The House of Lords Appointments Commission says that it does not know whether Lord Ashcroft is UK resident. The Cabinet Office and HM Customs and Revenue have declined to answer questions about his status, on grounds of privacy.

Sunday

Fraser Nelson

Brown waits to strike

Things are shaping up nicely for Gordon Brown ahead of the Pre-Budget Report next week. The Tories were 17 points ahead on ICM in October – now it’s 11. Cameron would have a narrow majority on this basis but, given the margin of error, we’re back into hung parliament territory. And this has a self-reinforcing effect on the Tories. A shrinking opinion poll means they tend to get paralysed, avoid arguments, play it safe, wait for Labour to screw up again. As I say in my News of the World column today, the voters who are looking for leadership then don’t really see it. This, of course, softens the Tory vote further. So the stage is set for Labour to get away with murder next week.

Saturday

James Forsyth

Recognising the best

On Thursday night Michael Gove announced that a Conservative government would pay off the student loans of those with good science degrees from quality universities. The move, paid for by cutting out a level of bureaucracy in teacher development, would help address the shortage of science and maths specialist in state schools. It was a smart piece of policy that even Ed Balls didn’t attack. But the Telegraph reports carping amongst various unions that the scheme does not go far enough. The NUT says that, “It is a real mistake to think that they can designate small number of universities as being better than the others.” This quote sums up so much of what is wrong with the British edcucational establisment.

Friday

James Forsyth

What possible justification can there be for this?

From The Guardian’s write up of the latest TPA report on public sector pay: “Those earning more than the prime minister include Professor Salman Rawaf, the director of public health in Wandsworth, who has a package of up to £370,550” I can accept that some people in the public sector with certain particularly valubale skills might have to be paid more than the PM. But I find it hard to see why Wandsworth is offering its director of public health a package worth more than a third of a million pounds. One hopes that the Tory policy which will see the Chancellor having to sign off on any public servant being paid more than the PM will put an end to this kind of excess.

David Blackburn

Another vindication of open primaries

Local girl Caroline Dinenage has won the Tories’ Gosport open primary race. Congratulations to her and commiserations to the other candidates: James Bethell, Julia Manning and Sam Gyimah. By all accounts the open primary process is proving hugely popular – over 12,000 votes were cast by post in this election. It is clear that the format encourages local political engagement; the Totnes primary was not a one off and evidently this process will become increasingly more common. Also, both elections have produced women, an indication that there is a clear alternative Central Office’s unintentionally divisive A-list strategy.

Daniel Korski

Don’t give us your unwashed masses

Downturns turn people against immigrants. That’s normal. But even according to the statistical average, Britons are particularly unhappy about the state of immigration these days. In a new survey undertaken by the German Marshall Fund, seventy-one percent of Britons polled disapproved of Labour’s immigration policy. Spaniards (64%), Americans (63%), Italians (53%) are also sceptical of government action.  In contrast, 71% of Germans, 59% of Canadians and 50% of French approved of the steps their countries had taken. In fact, Britons are the most sceptical about immigration, with 66% seeing it as more of a problem than an opportunity – a jump of seven percentage points on 2008 figures.

Fraser Nelson

Who cares about the playing fields of Eton?

The Eton question came up on Question Time – is Labour right to use class in the run-up to the election? I have a piece in The Guardian tomorrow on this theme. The answer should be that which Andrew Lansley read out on Question Time:  that this shows Labour is living in the past, what matters is where you’re going to not where you came from. He’s right. But I do wish the Tories would believe it. The Eton taunt is still taken far too seriously by the Cameroons: it hurts them. It’s a piece of verbal kryptonite. They go to great lengths to defend themselves from such an attack: the 50p tax, for example, is embraced by the Conservatives just so Brown can’t say “Cameron’s looking out for rich folk, just like him.

Thursday

James Forsyth

Could Brown go for a March 25th election?

The conventional wisdom in Westminster is that the election will be on May 6th. But a few shadow Cabinet members have told me that they think Brown will actually go in March, an idea that they have been pushing for a while. Their argument is that this quarter’s GDP figures will be quite good, boosted by the Christmas rush, and Brown would want to go to the country before, another more disappointing set of numbers came out. Second, Brown will want to avoid people seeing the effects of the new tax arranegements which will come into force in April. Finally, if the election was on May 6th, the first week of the campaign would be lost to the school holidays.

David Blackburn

The Tories, money and inheritance tax

Key to Labour’s emerging strategy is promulgating the myth that raising the inheritance tax threshold is designed to protect the Tories’ rich friends from the great unwashed. Despite its sojourn in the wilderness, the politics of envy remains crude at best. Raising IHT thresholds favours hardworking, modest Middle England. The super rich can protect their fortunes without the help of threshold raises, which are negligible by their standards in any event. James Macintyre proves as much in his latest New Statesman column. When detailing Tory donor Lord Harris’s IHT avoidance, Macintyre writes: ‘The Tory peer, whose wealth is estimated at roughly £285m, donated £90,000 to Cameron's campaign.

Mark Bathgate

Risky business | 3 December 2009

With the largest transfer of liabilities in British history – the insurance of the risk of loss on £240 billion of toxic RBS assets by taxpayers – proceeding, there is worryingly little information being given about either what these assets may be or what risks there are to the taxpayer. Rather than the parliamentary enquiry and detailed disclosure Swiss parliamentarians demanded when UBS needed similar assistance, a small press release noting such exotics as “structured credit assets “ has been issued. The spin continues to be that there is nothing to worry about and all this money will come back fine. Bank of England data shows that UK bank exposure to the US increased increased by over half a trillion dollars between 2004 and 2007 to 1.2 trillion.

Peter Hoskin

The choice facing the Tories

If you'd like a step-by-step preview of Labour's next election campaign, then do read Alastair Campbell's latest blog post.  All of Brown's attacks from PMQs are in there, and then some: "tax cuts for the rich"; a lack of "policy heavy lifting" on Cameron's part; the Tories "haven't really changed", etc. etc.  The spinmeister has been in closer contact with Downing Street recently, and it shows.  It's all gone a bit bar-brawling. The Tories now face a choice between, broadly speaking, three different responses: i) Ignore Campbell.

Wednesday

James Forsyth

Might there be some fight left in the class war after all?

The Tories are in mild shock following PMQs, they never expected Cameron to get clunked like that. Brown is clearly going to try and use Tory inheritance tax policy to ram home the message that a Cameron government will be a government of the rich, by the rich, for the rich. But the Tories are taking comfort from their belief that Brown’s ugly class war politics won’t work, pointing to how they failed in Crewe and Nantwich. But the attacks on Edward Timpson backfired, at least in part, because Timpson was a bad target. It is hard to portray someone as an out of touch, uncaring toff when their family have fostered 80 odd children and have a long history of local philanthropy.