Uk politics

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman

Mike Hancock suspended from Lib Dems

Mike Hancock has been suspended this afternoon as a Liberal Democrat councillor following the leak of the report into his conduct. The report, which was published in a redacted form, does not make comfortable reading at all, with some very unpleasant allegations from the constituent about his behaviour towards her, including that he forcibly kissed her, ‘asked for a wank or a quick suck’ and that he asked to be ‘the first one to road test drive’ her after a hysterectomy operation. You can read the report, sections of which have been redacted, here. Its author, Nigel Pascoe QC, has already expressed his concern about the redaction: ‘I have now

Sebastian Payne

Michael Gove announces a computing curriculum worthy of the 21st century

Finally, Britain’s children will be equipped for the Internet age. In a speech to the BETT education conference today, Michael Gove announced the details of the new computing curriculum, which will take effect from this September. As well a new Computer Science GCSE and a beefed-up A-Level (hopefully more schools will offer it), the new computing curriculum will begin for five year olds, and will consist of three strands. These are information technology (how to use computers in the real world), ‘digital literacy’ (confidently and safely using computers) and ‘computer science’ strands. The Computer Science strand is by far the most important. Since computers became significantly easier to use in

Isabel Hardman

Immigration Bill ‘to return to Commons’

After those crisis talks in Downing Street that I reported yesterday, I hear that the government plans to bring the Immigration bill back to the Commons with amendments. Number 10 is insisting that nothing has yet been confirmed but suggestions that it could return on Tuesday may be incorrect. Doubtless those government amendments are designed to calm backbenchers down sufficiently for them to withdraw their amendment. But I’ve just spoken to Nigel Mills, who tabled the amendment, and he is going to press it. He says: The government amendments are not unhelpful but don’t tackle the already existing issues of immigration from the EU being too high and leaving us

Isabel Hardman

Theresa May’s stop-and-search battle and the feverish Tory party

As predicted, Labour did make use of the Times’s story about Theresa May’s row with the Prime Minister over stop-and-search at PMQs today, using a backbench question from Steve Reed, who explicitly linked to Cameron’s ‘fear of Nigel Farage’. David Cameron gave a rather mollifying answer, telling the Commons that ‘stop-and-search does need reform’ and that ‘what’s really important is that stop-and-search is used properly but we don’t add to the burdens of the police’. listen to ‘PMQs: Does Cameron’s fear of Farage mean he’ll block stop-and-search reform?’ on Audioboo

Isabel Hardman

Jobs figures suggest Cameron and Osborne have survived their 364 economists moment

What is Ed Miliband going to ask David Cameron about at Prime Minister’s Questions today now that the latest employment figures show the biggest quarterly increase since records began, and the biggest quarterly fall in unemployment since 1997? Actually, there is quite a lot that he can talk about that means he can entirely avoid the subject – Nicky Morgan’s warning to the Tories about ‘hate’, Aidan Burley, the row between Number 10 and Home Office about stop-and-search and Syria – but the Prime Minister will make jolly well sure that he shoehorns it into any question that’s asked of him, even if it’s a backbench one about the welfare

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman

Downing Street holds crisis talks to revive Immigration Bill

What has happened to the Immigration Bill? I asked this question last week, and as it still doesn’t have a date for the report stage, it’s worth asking the question again. Now I hear that Number 10 has been holding crisis talks to try to get the legislation, which has been derailed by Nigel Mills’ troublemaking amendment calling for transitional controls on Bulgarian and Romanian migrants to be extended until the end of 2018. Yesterday, Mills and colleagues were summoned to Number 9 Downing Street, to talk to the chief whip and the Prime Minister’s backbench envoy John Hayes. The whips have previously approached Mills trying to strike a deal

Isabel Hardman

Ukip prepares ‘spooking’ campaign for Wythenshawe by-election

How will Ukip play the Wythenshawe and Sale East by-election? As a Labour seat with a relatively large majority (Sebastian profiles the constituency here), it’s a perfect location for Nigel Farage’s party to underline its claim that it can steal discontented voters from Labour just as easily as it does from the Tories. Labour is already nervous enough to be testing out special anti-Ukip leaflets arguing Farage is not on the side of the working class. It might have seemed a natural seat for the party’s Deputy leader Paul Nuttall to stand in. He gave a strong speech at the party’s autumn conference on how the Labour party no longer

Sebastian Payne

All you need to know about the Wythenshawe and Sale East by-election

It’s by-election time once more. In just over three weeks, the voters of Wythenshawe and Sale East in Greater Manchester will head to the polls on the 13 February to decide who will replace Paul Goggins, the Labour MP who died suddenly earlier this month. By-elections are often thought to be a useful barometer of how the country is feeling, but in reality they are mostly fought on hyperlocal issues. This one will no doubt be watched closely given the rapidly approaching Euro elections in May. The Tories and Lib Dems are unlikely to do well in either battles, while Ukip and Labour will be going head-to-head in both instances.

Isabel Hardman

IMF upgrades UK growth forecast to 2.4% from 1.9%

The good thing about economic forecasting is that it’s only right when it’s good news for your party. Today the IMF has upgraded its growth forecast for the UK in 2014 from 1.9% to 2.4%, which means that from a Coalition perspective the organisation – having had a rather rocky relationship with the Treasury over the past year or so – is entirely right and filled with jolly good fellows. This is the biggest upgrade for any developed nation. The IMF also said that growth in 2015 will be 2.2%. George Osborne calculated when he delivered last year’s Budget that he just needed to buy some time until the summer,

Isabel Hardman

What does Jessica Lee’s exit say about the Tory party?

Why has Jessica Lee become the fourth female MP from the 2010 intake to quit? The Erewash MP announced yesterday that she is standing down in 2015, saying ‘I have carefully considered by personal circumstances and responsibilities at this time, before taking this decision’. Friends of the popular Conservative say she is keen to return to her former job as a barrister, which is fair enough: in all walks of life people find that a career change doesn’t suit them as much as they thought. But is there a deeper problem here? Some are arguing that this is illustrative of a woman problem in the party, and indeed the Conservative

Isabel Hardman

Rennard row weakens Lib Dem ‘we make govt better’ line

It’s been a while since the Liberal Democrats commanded quite so much media attention or quite so much space on the front pages. If all publicity were good publicity, the volume of coverage that the party is receiving from the Rennard scandal would do wonders for its poll rating. But that’s not how it works, and particularly not when your top brass has spent months trying to tell voters that the Lib Dems are so very grown up, mature and thoughtful that they’d make any government better. It’s a little more difficult to see this party as the special secret ingredient in a good coalition when all the talk is

Monday

Isabel Hardman

Tories yet to select candidates to fight Lib Dem top dogs

The Tories have always denied rumours that they might give their coalition colleagues an easier ride at constituency level in the 2015 general election. But even though all three parties are very much on an election war footing now, the Conservatives have, strangely, yet to select candidates to fight two of their favourite ministers. The constituencies for Nick Clegg and Danny Alexander currently have no candidates, along with 28 others (including MPs the Tories aren’t quite so keen on working with in Coalition, such as Lynne Featherstone), while the other 27 have candidates in place. Alexander is easy to work with in the Treasury (I reported before Christmas that he’d

Isabel Hardman

Lib Dems: Rennard will not get the whip back and faces new investigation

As the bell announcing the afternoon sittings in Parliament rang across Westminster, the Lib Dems  announced that Lord Rennard will have his membership of the party suspended pending a new disciplinary procedure for failing to apologise to the women who he allegedly behaved inappropriately towards. A spokesman said: ‘Nick Clegg made clear last week, and again this morning, that it would be inappropriate for Lord Rennard to resume the Liberal Democrat whip unless he apologises. Lord Rennard has refused to do so. ‘The Regional Parties Committee, which oversees disciplinary procedures under the English Party membership rules, today decided to suspend Lord Rennard’s membership of the party pending a disciplinary procedure.

Isabel Hardman

Why announcing a tough new welfare policy isn’t as tough as it seems for Rachel Reeves

Rachel Reeves is setting out Labour’s tough new benefits policy today. The Tories don’t need to be unduly worried, given the poll lead they enjoy on welfare matters, but just in case, Iain Duncan Smith and Theresa May have penned a joint op-ed in the Daily Mail accusing Labour of a ‘shameful betrayal’ on welfare reform and controlling immigration. They list the party’s failures in government, saying: ‘With one hand, Labour doled out millions of pounds for people to sit on benefits. With the other, they opened the door to mass migration, with those from abroad filling jobs which our own people didn’t want or couldn’t get.’ Conservative spinners, meanwhile,

Sunday

Isabel Hardman

Ed ‘Teddy’ Miliband: Labour is the party of competition

Ed Miliband tends to enjoy success when he’s either stealing someone else’s clothes or offering a possibly unworkable policy that sounds catchy. This morning on the Andrew Marr Show he tried both tactics. Having nicked One Nation from the Tories and repeated the phrase so often that they probably don’t want it back, Miliband is now trying to ape a Republican president, Theodore Roosevelt. His close colleague Lord Wood sets out why Labour thinks this is a space it can jump into in a piece for Coffee House. listen to ‘Ed Miliband on the Andrew Marr Show’ on Audioboo The catchy line from this Roosevelt-style crusade is that Labour is

Stewart Wood

Ed Miliband is better placed than the Tories to follow Roosevelt

On Friday, Ed Miliband pledged to introduce greater competition in our banking market. Last September, he pledged to freeze energy prices for 20 months while our broken energy market is reset to expand competition and consumer choice. Reforming broken markets to increase competition and address the long-term sources of our cost-of-living crisis might seem an unusual theme for Labour to champion. In fact it is an approach that has learnt from a progressive conservative tradition, one that understands the importance of reform to ensure that markets remain open and competitive. Noone understood this idea better than the American President Theodore Roosevelt – a passionate believer in free enterprise, and a

Saturday

Sebastian Payne

Ukip councillor blames floods on Cameron and gay marriage

With just 124 days till European election polling day, you’d expect Ukip to be working tirelessly to professionalise the party’s operations and hide away any controversial opinions. They don’t appear to be doing a very good job so far. David Silvester, a Ukip councillor in Henley-on-Thames, has written to his local newspaper explaining how Britain’s recent spates of floods are David Cameron’s fault — because he has angered God with the Same Sex Marriage Bill: ‘The scriptures make it abundantly clear that a Christian nation that abandons its faith and acts contrary to the Gospel (and in naked breach of a coronation oath) will be beset by natural disasters such

Friday

Isabel Hardman

Nick Clegg begins to flex muscles over Rennard

Nick Clegg has in the past few minutes made clear that unless Lord Rennard apologises for his behaviour towards women in the party, he will not regain the Liberal Democrat whip. A party spokesman said: ‘Nick Clegg is of the view that as long as Lord Rennard refuses the very reasonable request from Alistair Webster QC to apologise that it is inappropriate for him to rejoin the Liberal Democrat group in the House of Lords. Nick has communicated this to the Chief Whip and Leader of the House of Lords group. ‘In addition, a growing number of party members have come forward to make representations to the party that Lord

Hamish Macdonell

Europe will affect the Scots referendum, but not in the way everyone expects

With William Hague in Glasgow this morning, the Scottish independence debate has swung round to Europe once again. Europe is indeed going to be important as we head towards the referendum, but perhaps not in the way everyone expects. The Foreign Secretary spent this morning warning that Scots would be worse off if they left the UK and then joined Europe as a separate country – without the UK’s rebate. This will rumble on until the September 18 poll, with claim and counter claim from both sides and neither able to prove anything definitively. Hague’s visit, though, has overshadowed one intriguing piece of polling data which could prove to be

Isabel Hardman

Ed Miliband’s tricky second album

Ed Miliband has spent the past few months celebrating the success of his conference pledge to freeze energy prices. He was so pleased with the disruption that this caused that he referenced it in his speech on banking reform today. He is right to be pleased with that pledge. It was a hit. It’s just that today’s speech, built up by the Miliband camp as the sequel to the price freeze, was the political equivalent of a difficult second album. You could see what he was trying to do. Sections of the speech were straight from the Obama playbook, just as his conference speech was, with appeals such as ‘Britain