Uk politics

Thursday

Constance Watson

Listen: what the people of Brixton and Chelsea think of Ukip and Farage

From our UK edition

London is, like the rest of the country, heading to the polls today. Coffee House went down to Brixton High Street to find out how people intend to vote, and gauge their views on Nigel Farage and UKIP. We found some some who intend to support Farage, others who were more apathetic. This is what they had to say: listen to ‘The people of Brixton on Ukip and Nigel Farage’ on Audioboo And on the other side of town, the people of Chelsea (although less willing to chat) had polarising views on Ukip and the Farage racism row: listen to ‘The people of Chelsea on Ukip and Nigel Farage’ on Audioboo Worryingly, many interviewees were opting out because they weren’t aware of the elections or were ignorant as to how to vote.

Isabel Hardman

The other awkward European vote

From our UK edition

When polls close tonight, another vote will open in one part of the country that could cause a bit of European trouble for David Cameron. Tory MPs Peter Bone and Philip Hollobone and Conservative candidate for Corby Tom Pursglove are running a In/Out referendum in North Northamptonshire, consulting around 250,000 people across three constituencies on Britain's membership of the European Union. The trio have timed the poll for after the European and local elections have closed for votes but before the result of the European elections is declared, partly so that they cannot be accused of making trouble in any way. They are, they argue, simply following Conservative party policy (now rather than two years ago, when a referendum was not Conservative party policy).

Peter Robins

The pleasures of voting

From our UK edition

The rhetoric with which we are exhorted to vote is grand and sententious: do your civic duty; people died so that you could etc. etc. The rhetoric with which we're exhorted not to vote is grander and more pretentious still. All of it makes voting sound like something between a chore and a possibly pointless low-level military mission, a matter of long queues and secrecy and mild, pervasive paranoia. In fact, for me at least, voting is a small but reliable pleasure. The thing I miss most about my old flat in the middle of Peckham is the polling station that came with it.

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman

Cameron defends government policy his Tory colleagues hate

From our UK edition

A Prime Minister defending a government policy is usually quite unremarkable. But today David Cameron defended the Government's free school meals policy, and given the amount of vitriol this has attracted between the two Coalition parties in recent weeks, that really is remarkable. He told the World at One: 'I don’t really accept it was made on the hoof because, as I say, it was trialled, a decent amount of time has been set aside for its introduction, £150m… Any change is always difficult and I think you should judge the change as it comes in.

Isabel Hardman

Ed Miliband’s weak shadow cabinet batting order

From our UK edition

Most of the reshuffle-related excitement in Westminster is focused on a pending Tory one. But does Ed Miliband's top team need a bit of freshening up too? I blogged last week that Labour backbenchers, including a number with serious experience of government, were unhappy with the way many of the Labour top dogs are failing to go out to bat for their leader. Miliband has certainly trodden on his stumps in the past few days with some broadcast gaffes, but he does have a problem with the batting order below him.

Alex Massie

Scotching a myth: Scotland is not as left-wing as you think it is

From our UK edition

Alex Salmond and David Cameron have more in common than a shared appreciation for Andy Murray's tennis. Not, of course, that you would ever persuade either of them to admit that. At the very least, their supporters are more alike than either man would like you to believe. A new survey commissioned by Dundee University's Five Million Questions project confirms as much. On a range of issues SNP supporters are as close, or closer, to Tory voters as they are to Labour voters: [datawrapper chart="http://static.spectator.co.uk/M9xAk/index.html"] This will not surprise diehard leftists, of course. If the First Minister was ever a socialist he ceased to be a comrade long ago and if SNP voters think* like Tories that may be because a good number of them used to be Tories.

Alex Massie

The Bearable Lightness of Being A British Scottish Nationalist

From our UK edition

Backstory: I wrote a post suggesting that Scottish Nationalists' rhetoric might these days usefully be compared to Doublethink. I suppose there were many who could have been chosen to serve as examples but I decided to pick on Pete Wishart, MP for Perth and North Perthshire. Unfairly I quoted him extensively, something I now concede was "point scoring" (though not, I protest, of the "pointless" kind). Anyway, Mr Wishart has now responded but not, I am afraid, with anything terribly persuasive. Let me, then, in a spirit of ecumenical pity, offer the response one of the many Pete Wisharts could have written... Patriot. Nationalist. Socialist. Whateverist. Multitudes lie within each of us. Or so the poets tell us.

Isabel Hardman

Joint Ukip candidates is Farage’s second best option

From our UK edition

Nigel Farage has stirred up talk again this morning of joint Conservative/Ukip or Labour/Ukip candidates. This has been doing the rounds ever since the Ukip leader mooted it in an interview with James in the Spectator, but neither main party is keen. The reason is that this would effectively outsource candidate selection to someone outside the Conservative or Labour party: only candidates Ukip considered sufficiently 'sound' according to its own standards would get the Farage kitemark, and therefore local parties with Ukip breathing down their necks might be tempted to choose a more Ukippish type to stand for them than otherwise. But there's another point worth making about the joint ticket.

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman

Carnival of the Ukippers

From our UK edition

Ukip's we're-not-racist ethnic minority carnival in Croydon always looked as though it was going to provide plenty of material for sketchwriters and critics. It was another attempt by the party to showcase its non-white members and candidates, with local candidate Winston McKenzie on hand too. But the event aimed at spinning a line about the party's open-mindedness spun out of control. The steel band told journalists they didn't know they'd been booked by Ukip, and were pretty unhappy about it too. Then a group of protesters accused the party of being Nazis. Then McKenzie, explaining why Nigel Farage had pulled out of attending the event, described the town he is standing for election in as a 'dump' and 'unsafe' because it had been failed by successive governments.

Sebastian Payne

Listen: Ed Miliband’s two car crash interviews in one day

From our UK edition

Ed Miliband seems to have clambered out of the wrong side of bed this morning. The Labour leader has been touring the TV and radio studios, where his answers have become progressively worse as the day went on. First up, Miliband spoke to Good Morning Britain about the 'cost-of-living crisis'. When asked whether he knew how much the average weekly household grocery bill was, he said ‘it depends on how much you are spending and how big your family is’. Then when questioned on how much the Miliband household spends, he said: ‘We probably spend £70-80 on groceries at least, probably more than that.

Isabel Hardman

Exclusive: Leading Tory eurosceptic calls for Cameron to ditch net migration target

From our UK edition

The next set of net migration figures are, conveniently, released on the day of the European and local elections. Some wonder whether this will add grist to the mill of those on the Tory Right who want to cause trouble for Cameron as they can demand that he crack down further on immigration. But I've discovered that if there is one demand eurosceptics will make, it will be for the Prime Minister to scrap the target, rather than try harder to meet it. The reasoning behind this is that the Prime Minister could argue that freedom of movement in the European Union makes it impossible for the Conservatives to have any real chance of meeting this target, save by introducing ever-tougher restrictions on non-EU immigration.

Sebastian Payne

Ukip vs Tories vs Labour — how alike are the voters?

From our UK edition

How similar are Ukip and Tory voters? Although the party hierarchies are keen to distance themselves from each other, there's plenty of overlap in the opinions of their supporters. Firstly, both groups are enthusiastic about heading to the polls this Thursday. A few weeks ago, Ukip was slightly ahead of the other parties in the likeliness to vote ratings. Now the polling says they're far more likely to vote than the Tories. According to the latest poll, almost three quarters of 'kippers say they will definitely vote on Thursday compared to a little over half for the Tories: [datawrapper chart="http://static.spectator.co.uk/4YxMN/index.html"] The Tories and Ukippers have similar views on Faragiste warnings about Bulgarian and Romanian immigrants coming to the UK: they believe them.

Monday

Isabel Hardman

Is he or isn’t he a racist? Why politicians don’t want to give a straight answer about Farage

From our UK edition

Mainstream politicians, never known for giving a straight answer, have been giving particularly wibbly and unclear responses to one particular question today. Is Nigel Farage a racist and was what he said about Romanians moving in next door racist? Ed Miliband did pick a particularly tortured definition of what Nigel Farage had said when asked about it on the Today programme. It was a 'racial slur' but Farage is not a racist, or at least, Miliband didn't want to make politics more 'disagreeable' by accusing Farage of being a racist. But he did say that Farage was right to apologise. Helpfully, Nick Griffin pitched in to tell BBC News that Farage wasn't racist, presumably on the basis that it takes one to know one.

Alex Massie

Scottish Nationalists have become Masters of Doublethink

From our UK edition

Let's be fair, however, UKIP have not cornered the market in weirdness. One of the odder elements of the Scottish independence campaign is the manner in which so many Yes voters deny being nationalists: I support independence but please don't make the mistake of thinking me a nationalist. I only support nationalist aims, like.  I suppose this is just about tenable if you are a member of the Green party or if you swim in one of the Yes campaign's other minor tributaries but it's a mighty rum thing to hear from members of the SNP. Which brings us to Pete Wishart, member of parliament for Perth and North Tayside. The other day he tweeted that he has "Never much cared for any 'nationalisms' whether Scottish, British or Whateverish.

Alex Massie

UKIP’s biggest problem is stupidity, not racism

From our UK edition

Let me be clear, any time you feel the need to write "Let me be clear - UKIP is not a racist party" you are in a pickle. Parties shunned by actual, honest-to-goodness, copper-bottomed, ocean-going racists don't usually need to make these things clear. There is a protesting-too-much vibe here, too, in which the more strenuously the Kippers reject the accusation so they only succeed in substantiating it. This might not be fair but it's also life. The precise point at which a party for racists or a party in which racists feel at home becomes a racist party is a metaphysical question the pondering of which need not detain us. Suffice it to say that Mr Farage's admission there are plenty of "idiots" within UKIP speaks for itself.

Steerpike

Fallon slapped down over EU campaign comments

From our UK edition

After Michael Fallon suggested that the Conservative party could campaign for the UK to leave the EU if a renegotiation proved unsuccessful, the Prime Minister's official spokesman was today asked about David Cameron's view on this. He said: 'The position hasn't changed. The Prime Minister is confident of success.' The Prime Minister's position is that he will definitely get the changes he wants and therefore he knows already that he will campaign to stay in the European Union in 2017. So the possibility that the party might have to campaign to stay out is being read in some quarters as a suggestion that Fallon and other ministers don't share his confidence and don't think he'll get the renegotiation result he wants.

Isabel Hardman

The danger for Miliband of being too confident about his anti-business stance

From our UK edition

Why is Ed Miliband so content with accusations that he's anti-business and a bit of a lefty? The Labour leader was grilled this morning on his relations with business leaders when he appeared on the Today programme, and while he did an adequate job of defending himself, he didn't seem too perturbed by the questions levelled at him, nor the suggestion that his party is bleeding votes to Ukip. Why is he displaying such zen-like calm? listen to ‘Miliband: UK 'one of worst developed countries' over low pay’ on Audioboo The reason is not just the Labour leader's intellectual self-confidence but also because the former is a way of solving the latter.

Sunday

James Forsyth

Westminster still expects Ukip to win

From our UK edition

The polls are all over the place this morning. Ukip is either on course for a thumping victory, going to be edged into second by Labour or has fallen into third place depending on which is your preferred pollster. But all three Westminster parties are operating on the assumption that Ukip will win, as I say in the Mail on Sunday. Certainly, Labour are getting their excuses in early. Those close to Miliband are quick to point out that Tony Blair never won a European Election and that the party machine will be concentrating more on Thursday’s council contests than the European Elections as having a strong council base will matter more in 2015 than who has the most MPs.

Saturday

James Forsyth

An NHS tax is just another name for a tax rise

From our UK edition

Finding a way to raise taxes that is popular is, for some on the centre-left, the Holy Grail. As the well connected Andrew Grice reports in The Independent today, a growing number of people on the Labour side are attracted to the idea of an NHS tax. Their logic is that the public value the NHS so wouldn’t mind paying more for it. They point out that when Gordon Brown raised National Insurance to fund extra spending on the health service there was none of the backlash you would normally expect to a tax rise. But the reality is that the introduction of a new NHS tax won’t be matched by tax cuts elsewhere. It will simply lead to people paying more tax overall. Demand on the NHS might well be about to rise.

Friday

Alex Massie

Why has fascism failed in the United Kingdom?

From our UK edition

Because, well, just look at them. These Young Spodes are not quite the Master Race are they? And this is the problem with extremism: it cannot avoid being ridiculous. I know there is never room for complacency but it's hard to feel threatened by these Pythonesque boobies. Nor is the absurdity limited to the white right. The problem for Muslim extremists in Britain is they swank around the place in their kaftans claiming to be voice of the people (or "their" people) unaware that the people (including "their" people) neither recognise them nor want anything to do with them. In time, thanks to the good sense and humour of the British people, they will fail too. The fire will be contained, then it will fizzle out.