Uk politics

Theresa May came to Scotland today to offer her support to Ruth Davidson. Notionally, the Scottish Tory leader is supposed to support the Prime Minister but in this election, Ruth is a greater asset to the Conservative and Unionist party than Theresa.  Today’s YouGov poll for The Times confirms as much. Mrs May has a net approval rating in Scotland of -17; Ms Davidson’s is +10. Two thirds of those voters who endorsed Labour candidates in 2014 think Davidson is doing a good job and so, remarkably, do one in three voters who supported the SNP two years ago.  The same poll was interesting precisely because there was nothing startling in it.

Lord Ashcroft’s reports from his election focus groups give a flavour of attitudes. All group members were asked to name a fictional character whom each party leader most resembles. One suggested Worzel Gummidge, the scarecrow, for Jeremy Corbyn. That was what everyone called Michael Foot in 1983. I wonder if the group member was old enough to remember this, or whether the comparison just swam naturally into her mind. This is an extract from Charles Moore's Notes. The full article is available tomorrow.

Prime Minister, I have good news and bad news.  The good news is that you have been denounced in the letters page of the Daily Telegraph. One correspondent huffs: 'I wonder if Theresa May and her small group of advisers closeted in Westminster are aware of the fact that each initiative they introduce in an attempt to win over traditional Labour voters risks having the opposite effect on traditional Conservative voters.’ Another damns your energy price cap as ‘wrong-headed’ and even accuses you of ‘play[ing] into the hands of Jeremy Corbyn’s muddle-headed electioneering economics’. Lord Tebbit echoes these fears: 'The further Labour goes Left, that would mean the further we go Left. We need to stick to sensible, Conservative economics.

Jeremy Corbyn wants to put up income tax only for people who earn more than £80,000 a year, he says. Anyone below that figure is safe. This reminds me of John Smith’s ‘shadow Budget’ in the 1992 general election. Smith said that the top rate of income tax would rise to 50 per cent for everyone earning more than £36,375 a year (which would be just under £72,000 today). Most people earned much less than the sum chosen, but voters decided they did not like such a clear intention to damage the higher earnings they hoped they might one day achieve. The shadow Budget was said to have lost Labour the election. Perhaps bearing this in mind, Mr Corbyn has so far avoided a specific percentage and pitched the taxable sum a little higher, but the signal is similar.

Nothing better sums up middle-class millennials’ sense of entitlement than their demand that they be paid for interning. ‘Paid internships now!’ has become the rallying cry of young media people and the Twitterati and now the Labour Party, too. Its throwback manifesto, leaked this week, promises to ‘ban unpaid internships’, on the basis that ‘it’s not fair for some to get a leg up when others can’t afford to’. Self-regarding youths will cheer this, as will their sad-eyed supporters in the press, but the rest of us should raise a collective eyebrow. There are many grating things about the call for paid internships. Here are just three of them.

Chatham House has been at the forefront of thinking on Britain’s role in the world. So with the General Election less than a month away, it’s a great place to set out my approach: on how a Labour Government I lead will keep Britain safe, reshape relationships with partners around the world, work to strengthen the United Nations and respond to the global challenges we face in the 21st century. And I should say a warm welcome to the UN Special Representative in Somalia,  Michael Keating, who is here today. On Monday, we commemorated VE Day, the anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany in Europe. VE Day marked the defeat of fascism and the beginning of the end of a global war that claimed seventy million lives.

Just when you thought things couldn't get any worse for Labour, Noam Chomsky goes and endorses Jeremy Corbyn. 'If I were a voter in Britain, I would vote for him...He’s quiet, reserved, serious, he’s not a performer,' Chomsky told the Guardian. But the more you read of Chomsky's endorsement, the more you wonder if he was put up to it for a bet. He says that: 'The shift in the Labour party under Blair made it a pale image of the Conservatives.' Tony Blair, that infamous electoral dud. Chomsky is regularly cited as the world's 'top public intellectual'. It's a slippery phrase. Friedrich Hayek called his ilk 'the secondhand dealers in ideas'. I certainly wouldn't buy a used ideology from Noam Chomsky.

I didn’t see a ferret, reverse or otherwise, during Labour’s campaign launch or after. I heard some quite silly, grandstanding, questions from Laura Kuenssberg. And I heard a Labour leader who sounded a bit like…..well, a decent Labour leader. None of this is to deny the patent catastrophe of Corbyn’s leadership of the party hitherto, or to suggest that I agreed with everything he said. But he spoke from the heart, passionately, with a conviction I do not hear in Theresa May’s frankly automaton repetitiveness. And much of what Corbyn had to say about tax avoiders, inequalities and hardship will play very well with his core vote north of the Wash. I still wouldn’t vote for him and still less for his grim and sinister sidekick McDonnell.

Out on the campaign trail in Leeds today, Theresa May stated that she supports fox hunting. ‘As it happens personally I have always been in favour of fox hunting and we maintain our commitment - we have had a commitment previously as a Conservative Party - to allow a free vote,' she said. The Prime Minister has consistently voted against the ban on hunting, and the general consensus has been that although she doesn’t necessarily think of it as a particularly important issue, she is supportive of the hunting community.  But it is perhaps something of a surprise that May has today come out and publicly said that she is actively in favour of fox hunting.