Uk politics

You can’t put a price on freedom. Well now, it seems, you can: or rather, one senior academic has done so and his verdict? Scottish independence will cost £200 million. On the surface, Professor Patrick Dunleavy’s conclusions on the set-up costs for an independent Scotland look good for the Nationalists. After all, that £200 million is remarkably close to the figure Alex Salmond has been throwing around for the last week or so and some considerable distance from the £2.7 billion figure the Treasury has been bandying around. In fact, Prof Dunleavy’s report (which was published today) makes the Treasury look pretty foolish and more than a bit amateurish. For weeks, Danny Alexander has been warning of set-up costs of £2.

David Cameron has not had the best of weeks. At home, he is engaged in a mucky fight with the former government aide Dominic Cummings and abroad he is facing defeat in his attempt to stop Jean-Claude Juncker from becoming president of the European Commission. But in the papers today, it is Ed Miliband who has all the problems. The Guardian splashes on how Labour frontbenchers do not want Miliband to stay on after an election defeat. If this story had appeared in almost any other paper, Miliband’s team could have tried to dismiss it as the price you pay for standing up to Rupert Murdoch or backing Leveson. But with The Guardian, this is much harder to do.

How many seats will the Conservatives take from the Lib Dems at the next election? According to Lord Ashcroft’s latest polling, a dozen or so Tory-Lib Dem marginals look set to change hands. Surveying 17,000 voters in 17 seats*, Ashcroft has found the Lib Dems’ share has dropped by 15 per cent (compared to eight per cent for the Conservatives) with an overall swing of 3.5 per cent to the Tories. If this swing were replicated across the country, this would hand David Cameron another 15 seats in 2015. However, Ashcroft’s research suggests there isn’t a universal swing. For example in Newton Abbot, the polling suggests a nine per cent swing but in Wells, it was three per cent.

As expected, Nick de Bois' amendment to the Criminal Courts and Justice Bill passed 404 votes to 53. It owes nothing to the Conservative frontbench, which abstained for reasons I've tried my best to outline here (it's difficult to explain something that doesn't make a grab deal of sense, especially when both parties have voted in different ways before, as on the boundary changes). And it owes nothing to the Liberal Democrats, who opposed the measure in Cabinet and in this vote. The result this evening is an example of the way the Coalition has reshaped the workings of government. Can't get the Cabinet agreement you need on a policy? Let it rise up from the backbenches instead and hope for an unholy alliance with the Opposition.

Is Generation Y becoming more right wing and self-obsessed? Radio 4 broadcast a very interesting documentary tonight, Generation Right, on whether my generation is becoming more individualistic — featuring this parish’s Toby Young and Fraser Nelson. Both argued that some of our values might be perceived as right-wing but the trend isn’t that simple. Thanks to greater choice and empowerment of the individual, Generation Y is far less trusting of the state, which one could translate as a form of small-c conservatism. The Independent’s Yasmin Alibhai-Brown is someone who believes that. She told Radio 4 my generation is selfish and spoilt: ‘…they’re a frightfully spoilt generation.