Uk politics

Friday

Isabel Hardman

Nigel Farage: We can win the European elections

Nigel Farage likes to argue he’s not a normal politician. He says what he thinks and what other people think too. He certainly didn’t do what other politicians are trying to do ahead of the European elections, which is expectation management. Instead, he set the bar pretty darn high for Ukip, telling his party’s spring conference in Torquay that ‘we can cause an earthquake on May 22nd by winning the European elections’, adding ‘if we top those polls, it will then give us the momentum to drive us forward to the general election a year after that’. He has set Ukip a big challenge there because if the party doesn’t

Isabel Hardman

Is Labour aiming for victory, or just the largest party, in 2015?

You won’t catch Ed Miliband or David Cameron admitting that their best hope of governing after 2015 is in a coalition or a minority government. But what if their party machines have already decided that this is what’s going to happen anyway? There are secret discussions within the Labour party about scaling back the number of ‘target seats’ (the seats that it will pour the most resources into in order to win – full list here) from the official list of 106 to 80, or even just 60, which means that some in Labour think it is better to aim to be the largest party rather than out-and-out victory. I

Thursday

James Forsyth

Welcome to the age of four-party politics

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_27_February_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman on why the two party political system is dying” startat=1207] Listen [/audioplayer]Two things will make the next general election campaign quite unlike any previous election in this country. The first is that we now have four-party politics right across Britain. In Scotland and Wales, the nationalist parties have been a political force for a generation. But the big change is in England, where Ukip is emerging as a fourth force. Second, the campaign will be haunted by the spectre of another hung parliament. The question of what happens if no party wins an overall majority will be asked time and time again by

Isabel Hardman

MP who discussed defection with Ukip tells Coffee House: I couldn’t trust Farage

The Telegraph’s Chris Hope has a very interesting interview with Ukip Treasurer Stuart Wheeler in which he says seven Tory MPs had lunch with him to discuss a possible defection to the party. Wheeler says these talks took place more than a year ago, and since then the excitement about possible defections has clearly died down. Why aren’t Tory MPs interested any more in defections? I’ve spoken in private to most of the MPs who held talks with Wheeler – and some with Nigel Farage too – and most of them say they feel there is still a good chance of their party winning in 2015, and that David Cameron’s

Alex Massie

Standard Life becomes the latest firm to bully Scotland. But is it bluffing?

No-one should be surprised that Standard Life has warned it might leave Scotland should the country vote for independence later this year. It is not exactly a secret that Edinburgh’s financial services industry is concerned by the possible – indeed plausible – implications of independence. The suggestion – sorry, the threat – that it might leave Scotland is already being characterised by nationalists as yet more bullying, this time of the corporate rather than political kind. No doubt this is a blustering bluff too.  But what if it isn’t? The sorry truth is that Edinburgh’s financial sector is not quite what once it was. The Bank of Scotland is a small part of the

Isabel Hardman

Standard Life intervention in independence debate suggests business nerves about chance Scotland could vote ‘yes’

The Yes campaign’s response so far to the story that Standard Life would consider transferring some of its operations to England from Scotland in the event of a ‘Yes’ vote has been to argue that what the company wants is ‘exactly what the Scottish government has proposed’. Some Nats think this is another example of bullying from ‘monied elites’, but so far the official campaign has wisely blamed the ‘No’ campaign for creating uncertainty for businesses. After weeks of arguing about bullying and ‘campaign rhetoric’ from Westminster politicians, perhaps the SNP realises that making the same accusation of a business for setting out contingency plans would be going overboard (but

Michael Gove

Nature belongs at the heart of school life

History, Edmund Burke wrote, is ‘a pact between the dead, the living and the yet unborn.’ Nowhere is this pact more important than in our relationship with nature. Conservative governments have always sought to protect and enhance the natural environment – whether through Disraeli’s Public Health Act, which sought to limit the environmental impact of the industrial revolution; or Eden’s Clean Air Act, which helped lift the London smog.  We shouldn’t forget it was Margaret Thatcher’s drive to cut sulphur emissions that stopped the acid rain which was damaging our woodlands and killing the fish in our lakes and rivers. It’s not just a safe and secure environment we are

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman

Gove: Lib Dems think we’re anti-apple pie, cream and custard. Clegg: We’re being grown up about Coalition

The Coalition is merely cohabiting now – that much has been clear for a while. But one partner doesn’t seem to acknowledge quite how unreasonable its behaviour is. The Lib Dems have been cheesing off the Tories with what have appeared to be an increasing number of increasingly heated attacks: from David Laws wading into the Ofsted row to Ed Davey attacking ‘diabolical’ and ‘wilfully ignorant’ Tories, and from even ‘native’ Danny Alexander making dire (but specific) threats about his dead body and taxation to Nick Clegg describing George Osborne’s call for further cuts in welfare spending after 2015 as a ‘monumental’ mistake. But today at his monthly press conference,

Isabel Hardman

Tory greens make hard-headed pitch for environmentalism

Something strange is happening in the world of green Conservatism. After the PM decided to take out the ‘green crap’ last year, greeny Tories might have been forgiven for beating a bit of a retreat and licking their wounds. Well, if they did, they didn’t take much time to do it: now they’re fighting hard with a new vision for Green Toryism. Today the Conservative Environment Network re-launched with a pamphlet called Responsibility and Resilience which argues that true Conservatism is the best worldview for environmental policy. It contains quite an interesting mix of voices, from Zac Goldsmith to Environment Secretary Owen Paterson, who has written an essay on natural

Isabel Hardman

Low Pay Commission backs 3% rise in minimum wage

So after all the to-ing and fro-ing over whether the minimum wage will get a big fat rise, the Low Pay Commission has recommended that the rate rise by 3 per cent to £6.50 an hour from October 2014. George Osborne had said that he wanted to ‘see an above-inflation increase in the minimum wage’, pointing out at the same time that ‘if, for example, the minimum wage had kept pace with inflation, it would be £7 by 2015/16’ (full quotes and audio here, if you need a reminder). If he did want it to rise to £7 by 2015/16, that would mean a much bigger rise from the LPC

Isabel Hardman

The Workers’ Party?

Much hilarity among those of a leftish persuasion in Westminster that the Conservatives might dare call themselves the Workers’ Party, as Grant Shapps enthusiastically did yesterday. Mind you, when Shapps gave his speech making this claim alongside Sir John Major yesterday, journalists were excluded, so he might not have said it at all. But assuming he did, there’s no reason why the Conservatives should provoke any more hilarity than any other Westminster party when they make this claim. There are, though, two warnings that if not heeded, could make this new tag seem as hilarious to voters as previous attempts at rebranding. The first comes from David Skelton, whose campaign

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman

Harriet Harman’s messy war with the Mail

Go to war with the Daily Mail at your peril: Ed Miliband did it over its ‘the man who hated Britain’ column and now perhaps the Labour party is seeing the revenge for that with the paper’s ongoing insistence that Harriet Harman apologise for the National Council for Civil Liberties’ links to the Paedophile Information Exchange in the 1970s. Harman, though, is going to war with the Mail again, and her supporters in the press are arguing that the paper is on thin moral ground here. Harman’s messy handling of the story has kept it going as much as anything else. She gave a forceful interview to Newsnight yesterday in

Isabel Hardman

Tory MPs dismiss minority govt hints as lacking ‘solid logic’

While Number 10 is pouring cold water on suggestions that the Prime Minister might rule out a second coalition in the 2015 manifesto, his MPs have given it a rather icy reception. If the hints about him preferring a minority government to governing with the Lib Dems were supposed to reassure those on the Right that he does love them more than he loves Nick Clegg, they seem to have backfired rather. Instead, Conservative MPs I’ve spoken to today are annoyed for a variety of reasons. The first is that backbenchers feel any plan to rule out a coalition in the manifesto is counterproductive. It’s worth noting that Number 10

Isabel Hardman

How helpful can Angela Merkel be?

Angela Merkel is, as James explains in this week’s magazine, central to David Cameron’s hopes of getting anything meaty at all from his renegotiation and reform of the European Union. Her address to Parliament later this week will be scrutinised for every hint that she might support one reform or another – and for her enthusiasm for supporting Cameron in his quest. So it would be helpful if Merkel said some encouraging things in her speech. But can the Prime Minister suggest anything that would be particularly helpful for the German Chancellor to say? Asked about it at this morning’s lobby briefing, the Prime Minister’s official spokesman insisted that the

Isabel Hardman

Minority government hint is boost for backbenchers – if they believe it

That David Cameron is reportedly considering committing to minority government above coalition is a strong message to his backbenchers that he’s not preparing to hop back into bed with Nick Clegg and co in 2015. They have been growing a little feverish about the idea, and ministers have made it known in the party that they would vote against a coalition in any secret ballot on a new deal (provided, of course, that there is a secret ballot). This is good for party relations in the straightforward sense that Cameron is signalling to his backbenchers that he doesn’t like the Lib Dems as much as they suspect he does, but also

Monday

Isabel Hardman

David Cameron’s ‘unremittingly positive’ case for the Union

David Cameron says he wants the case that he makes for the Union and against Scottish independence to be ‘unremittingly positive’. Is it? In an interview with BBC News, the Prime Minister said: ‘That’s my whole argument, which is go back to the big picture, and I think this family of nations is better off together. Not just is better off in the United Kingdom, but we in the rest of the United Kingdom think we’re better off with Scotland that we want you to stay. That argument is one that is unremittingly positive about the success of this family of nations and how we should keep this family together.

Alex Massie

The Etonian, the SNP and the Black, Black Oil

You will recall that, according to the greatest account of England’s history, every time the English thought they had solved the Irish Question, the Irish changed the Question.  Something similar afflicts David Cameron’s grapplings with the Scottish Question. The poor man is damned if he does and equally damned if he doesn’t. The other week he was lambasted for his effrontery in giving a speech about Scotland in, of all places, London. Today he is lambasted for bringing his cabinet to Aberdeen. How dare he lecture us from afar; how dare he venture north like some touring proconsul! The optics, as the pros say, are not very good for the Prime

Isabel Hardman

Salmond attacks credibility of ‘No’ campaign threats

There’s not much the Cabinet can do about accusations by the SNP that today’s visit to Aberdeen is a typical Westminster attempt to bully Scots by flying up to make yet another tranche of negative announcements about the consequences of independence, focusing this time on North Sea oil. If Cabinet ministers didn’t make this trip, they would be accused of being feart. On balance, it’s better to engage than cower, even if today’s offensive by Ed Davey and others hardly helps the impression that the ‘No’ campaign is wholly negative. But whether or not the Prime Minister or colleagues find themselves accidentally bumping into Alex Salmond as the two rival