Uk politics

Monday

Isabel Hardman

William Hague: Ukraine is the biggest crisis in Europe in the 21st Century

From our UK edition

You couldn't accuse William Hague of using soft language on the Today programme this morning when he said that 'it is certainly the biggest crisis in Europe in the 21st Century and it will require all our diplomatic efforts, but also a great deal of strength in the western world in order to deal with this satisfactorily'. He urged Russia to 'return to that situation, to being in its bases, to having its assets in Crimea' while recognising the 'sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine'. listen to ‘Hague: ‘No justification’ for Russian action in Ukraine’ on Audioboo But what will the international community do, other than use strong language that Putin may or may not care to ignore?

Sunday

Isabel Hardman

Lord Owen’s backing for Labour reforms rounds off good weekend for Miliband

From our UK edition

Lord Owen's announcement that he backs Ed Miliband's union reforms and is donating £7,500 to the party rounds off a good weekend for the Labour leader. Owen quit the party in 1981 to set up the SDP, but last night announced that he wanted to support Labour campaigns to reverse the 2012 Health and Social Care Act. He said: 'This is a brave and bold reform by Ed Miliband and one I strenuously argued for as a Labour MP at the special conference on Saturday, 25 January 1981. This very desirable change, nevertheless, threatens to weaken Labour's financial support at a critical time when I and many others are hoping to see the Party produce a plan for Government from May of next year to rescue our NHS.

Saturday

Mathieu Vaillancourt

The Tories should look to Canada for victory

From our UK edition

Is it really possible for the Tories to win a majority in 2015 after five years in government? Perhaps they need to look at the Conservatives in Canada, who won their majority in the 2011 elections after two elections where they won a minority government. But the way the party won this majority was partly down to its active courting of the New Canadians - new migrants to the country from al over the world. Canada's largest city, Toronto is probably the most diverse in the world, with half of its population from 'visible minorities'.

Isabel Hardman

Conservative ministers link Russian aggression to Miliband’s Syria stance

From our UK edition

Sajid Javid isn't the only observer of Russia's behaviour over the situation in Ukraine to link Vladimir Putin's aggression to the situation in Syria. Perhaps the West's decision not to intervene in that conflict has given Putin the sense that he can do what he wants without any response from other countries. But Javid's suggestion in a tweet this afternoon that there is a 'direct link between Miliband's cynical vote against Syria motion and Russia's actions on Ukraine. Completely unfit to lead Britain' goes rather further than that. It also doesn't fit particularly comfortably with the fact that 30 of Javid's own Conservative colleagues rebelled on that motion and many more abstained. His colleague Nick Boles has made a similar point: https://twitter.

Isabel Hardman

Labour kindly highlights Waitrose’s free coffee scheme

From our UK edition

At least when the Conservatives blathered on about chocolate oranges, they had the excuse that Britain was feeling pretty good about itself. Today, the party that brought you the cost-of-gymming crisis has taken up a new campaign which just shows how noble and powerful opposition can be. It's already being branded Labour's CostaCoffeeCrisis, but it involves an attack on Waitrose for the heinous crime of offering its customers free coffee. The FT's Jim Pickard has the story that Labour shadow communities minister Andy Sawford has written to every MP with a local Waitrose asking them to campaign against the offer (which is available through the myWaitrose loyalty scheme, something many people didn't know about until Labour helpfully pointed it out).

Friday

Isabel Hardman

Nigel Farage: We can win the European elections

From our UK edition

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 come first, then regardless of how well the Tories do, they can deflect the attention onto Ukip.

Isabel Hardman

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

From our UK edition

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 explain why party officials think this is wise and what Ed Miliband could do to stop it in my Telegraph column today.

Thursday

James Forsyth

Welcome to the age of four-party politics

From our UK edition

[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 an impatient media.

Isabel Hardman

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

From our UK edition

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 EU referendum pledge did give them hope that he was finally listening to them. This was something Farage accepted when I spoke to him earlier this month.

Alex Massie

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

From our UK edition

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 Lloyd's group. So is Scottish Widows.

Isabel Hardman

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

From our UK edition

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 you never know).

Michael Gove

Nature belongs at the heart of school life

From our UK edition

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.

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman

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

From our UK edition

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, Clegg denied that his party was pursuing an aggressive policy of differentiation.

Isabel Hardman

Tory greens make hard-headed pitch for environmentalism

From our UK edition

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 capital.

Isabel Hardman

Low Pay Commission backs 3% rise in minimum wage

From our UK edition

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 next time round, which is possible. This is a reminder of a problem politicians have encountered in a completely different policy area over the last few weeks: they don't have much power any more.

Isabel Hardman

The Workers’ Party?

From our UK edition

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 Renewal is pushing for the Tories to do more to appeal to working class voters.

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman

Harriet Harman’s messy war with the Mail

From our UK edition

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 which she insisted that she had nothing to apologise for, then 12 hours later suggested that the links between NCCL and PIE were 'regrettable'.

Isabel Hardman

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

From our UK edition

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 sources are insisting that 'our manifesto is about policy' rather than giving any suggestion that there would be a commitment on minority government in the document.

Isabel Hardman

How helpful can Angela Merkel be?

From our UK edition

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?