Uk politics

Saturday

Isabel Hardman

Watson interview piles pressure on Labour to publish Falkirk report

Decca Aitkenhead has a history of producing revelatory August interviews that make tricky reading for the Labour leadership. Her 2008 interview with Alistair Darling involved the journalist following him around during the August recess and unleashed the 'forces of hell' against the then Chancellor when it was published. Her interview with Tom Watson in today's Guardian fits in with that tradition. Watson argues that there is no case for Unite to answer over Falkirk: Watson thinks on all three counts his party got it wrong. "I thought it was silly to report the allegations to the police, bordering on wasting police time." The whole affair, he insists, is "a storm in a teacup", since neither Murphy nor Unite did anything wrong.

Friday

Isabel Hardman

How the Tories planned to spend this summer behaving like an opposition party

Unless you're as optimistic as Jon Ashworth, it's pretty clear that messaging-wise, Labour have had a pretty bad summer. There are many reasons for this that many wise people have examined in quite some detail and at quite some length, but one of the major strategic errors is that the party appears to have made entirely the wrong assumption about what the Tories had planned for recess. Labour was clearly just lying in wait for more mistakes and bad news to come crawling out of the woodwork over the holidays. But they'd reckoned without the months of careful planning that the Conservatives had put into this slower season.

Ben Lyons

Brendan O’Neill is wrong on unpaid internships

For this week’s edition of The Spectator, Spiked Magazine Editor Brendan O’Neill has put forward a passionate defence of unpaid internships. And he has a long list of insults for those of us who disagree – we are 'ridiculous', 'preposterous' and 'nauseating'. I can appreciate why he might be so angry about our efforts to ensure fair practice: 'Due to limited funds' at his website, 'interns work on a voluntary basis.' O’Neill’s unpaid interns provide him with 'administrative support', enabling them to improve their 'organisational skills', alongside writing and research. As O’Neill knows (Spiked internships can last several months), modern day unpaid internships are a far cry from the week or two’s work experience of the past.

Melanie McDonagh

The row about Stuart Wheeler shows Britain has turned into a giant version of Woman’s Hour

The hunt, since you ask, is on for one of Stuart Wheeler’s three very pretty daughters – Jacquetta is a well-known model – to opine about their father’s off-message remarks about women being 'nowhere near as good as men' at chess, bridge and poker. This was in response to a question about why there are so very few women on company boards. Stuart Wheeler, UKIP treasurer and Douglas Hurd lookalike, went on to explain that both sexes are good at different things and 'you don’t necessarily want to impose a minimum of either sex at the top of any profession or at the top of any board'. Here Wheeler showed his engaging naivety. His observation was, of course, the contemporary no-say.

Ed West

Is eastern European immigration a result of the working class being demonised?

We had a Bulgarian chap do up our house. Lovely guy, worked all day and never wanted a break, and I didn’t have to drop my aitches or pretend to like football around him. Actually he turned out to be Polish but after weeks of me asking questions about Bulgaria he presumably felt too embarrassed and just played along with it. But there are many Bulgarians working in north London, and Birmingham, and they tend to be quite skilled, there being restrictions on who can work here. Naturally as those restrictions are removed, and as the quantity of immigration goes up, the quality goes down. MigrationWatch claim that net migration from Romanian and Bulgaria will be 50,000 every year for the next five years, and the group were pretty accurate in predicting the 2004 A8 influx.

Isabel Hardman

Number 10 should beware accidentally briefing EU renegotiation shopping list

This is how the Downing Street spin machine works: a Bad Story that may make your core vote very upset appears in the papers. You brief that you are doing something Very Serious in response to said Bad Story and hope that when it comes to the meeting where you have to raise said Very Serious measure, the media will be getting worked up about a will or the latest pronouncement by a leading light in Ukip about women in the workplace. Today's example of this rule is the briefing to The Times that Downing street wants to put 'curbing the right of EU migrants to benefits at the heart of impending discussions with Brussels aimed at winning back powers for Britain'. This followed yesterday's story about a rise in the number of Romanian and Bulgarian migrants working in the UK.

Thursday

James Delingpole

Ukip are playing it safe – so they’ve rejected me

So farewell then £80,000 salary, £150,000 expense account, secretary, team of assistants, constituency office, first-class travel, immunity from prosecution, Brussels blowouts, ludicrous pension and all the other perks I’d been so looking forward to enjoying from May next year onwards. Ukip has decided that it doesn’t, after all, want to have me as one of its MEPs. The rejection came as a bit of a surprise, I must say. When the party chairman, Steve Crowther, rang to break the news, I felt rather as Brad Pitt might on being turned down for a mercy shag he’d proffered Ann Widdecombe. No offence intended to Ukip — I think they’re great people and a very necessary prick to the Westminster bubble.

Isabel Hardman

Labour’s uninspiring response to A Level results

During silly season, bored journalists often entertain themselves by reading rather than deleting the slew of pointless press releases that land in their inboxes. Today's winner was going to be a pitch that opened with the dangerous phrase 'Good Morning, I hope you are well?' (always a sign the PR is sending this release to a very long list of hacks they've never spoken to) went on to suggest a story about grooming and beauty tips for Coffee House. But then Labour's press office sent through a  release full of such wisdom and careful crafting that it could only have gone through several committees and possibly even PLP votes to perfect.

Steerpike

Coffee Shots: John Prescott celebrates

John Prescott took to Twitter today to congratulate all the pupils receiving their AS and A-level results  today. His message to them? To all those waiting for #ALevels! Get one of these for your #ALevelsJumpForJoyPics #PrezzALevels pic.twitter.com/mTVuQjIG3P — John Prescott (@johnprescott) August 15, 2013 He certainly doesn't look like your average A-level celebrator, as seen in the Daily Mail, Telegraph et al. Perhaps Comrade Gove ought to add trampolining to his newly reformed PE curriculum.

Wednesday

Harry Cole

Labour’s ‘cost of living’ eggacy

‘Well the cost of living can’t be that high if people can waste eggs’, chortled many a wag today as silly season exploded all over Ed Miliband’s face and jacket. As reported, the shell-shocked Labour leader was in South London to talk about the rising cost of living under the Tories, but had his media appearance poached by a protester hurling a dozen eggs at him. Giving Miliband the benefit of the doubt for a moment, how have living costs risen? Let's take a piece of random household expenditure, something that immediately springs to mind. Eggs, say. Wholesale cost of eggs in the UK (pence per dozen) Source: https://www.gov.

The Spectator

Interns, stop whingeing!

In this week's Spectator, Brendan O'Neill turns on unpaid interns who complain about their lot, arguing that they should instead be paying their employers for the opportunity. He attacks the argument that unpaid internships hit working class young people the hardest, when these placements will encourage self-drive, rather than self pity. O'Neill writes: It speaks volumes about the parlous state of modern history teaching that these interns so liberally refer to themselves as ‘slaves’. Anyone who had been taught properly about the Roman era, or about black slavery in early America, or about the Holocaust, would know that there’s rather more to being a slave than being asked by a gruff boss to buy him a hazelnut latte.

Alex Massie

David McLetchie’s decency served the Tories well but they need bolder leadership now.

David McLetchie, who died this week aged only 61, was a politician who, in style and manner, rebuked those cynics who presume - lazily - that politicians go into politics to advance causes that have nothing to do with the public good. This may seem ironic given that his own stewardship of the Scottish Conservative and Unionist party was abruptly curtailed by a row over the misuse of parliamentary taxi warrants but there you have it. That "scandal" was, as Bill Jamieson reminds us today, typical of life at Holyrood: a micro-tempest in an espresso cup. Like the "scandals" that brought down Henry McLeish and Wendy Alexander it now seems embarrassingly trivial. Officegate, Taxigate, Giftgate: never before had this tedious suffix been so abused.

Isabel Hardman

Tories and Lib Dems pass on will donation to contain row

So both the Lib Dems and the Tories have yielded to the inevitable, and passed on the Joan LB Edwards donation to the Treasury. Their responses were swifter than even critical friends might have expected. The Lib Dems were first out of the starting blocks in the race to the moral high ground by announcing they'd be writing a cheque to the Treasury. But before Nick Clegg even had time to start recording a new autotune version of 'I'm Sorry' about how 'we took a donation that we couldn't possibly keep (but frankly could have done with given the state of the party coffers)', the Tories decided they had to do the same. So that's that, row contained and moral high ground reached by both parties. Except stories like this never do politics any favours at all.

Alex Massie

War from the ground up and the limits of modern government?

Emile Simpson's War from the Ground Up, hailed by no less an authority than Michael Howard (the historian, not the politician) as a Clausewitz-for-our-times, is on my "to read" list. So I was interested to discover that he's the latest subject of the Financial Times's reliably excellent "Lunch with the FT" feature. The whole article merits attention but among the good bits is this: As a young soldier in the Prussian army, Clausewitz fought at a time when the whole conception of conflict was being revolutionised. In the late 18th century, war was not unlimited: the great powers would try to defeat the enemy on the battlefield to gain an advantage but they rarely knocked out other states.

Isabel Hardman

The Coalition parties can’t hold on to Joan Edwards’ donation

An argument over a will is just the sort of thing this slow-moving summer needs. Today's row isn't between two factions of a family, but the two parties in the Coalition and the Daily Mail, which reports that a donation from a Mrs Joan LB Edwards was split between the two parties when her will suggests she wanted it donated to the government, rather than political parties. The paper's report quotes a section of her will, which it says it has seen: 'I bequeath all my estate both real and personal to… whichever government is in office at the date of my death for the government in their absolute discretion to use as they may think fit.' The parties are arguing that the donation was passed on out of the blue and that they did everything properly their end.

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman

Why the happy Tories can’t relax after Labour’s bad summer

Last December, after one of the most brutal PMQs this Parliament has seen, David Cameron was walking through the corridors of the Palace of Westminster to address a 1922 Committee meeting. Ed Miliband had subjected the Prime Minister to a real savaging, and Labour backbenchers had loyally joined in, raising a constituent's suicide and describing Cameron's government as ‘grandeur for the few, the workhouse for the many'. It had been a bleak session. Heading for Committee Room 14, the Prime Minister bumped into a junior minister, who was keen to reassure him that everything would come out in the wash. He told Cameron that 'they can go for the emotional attack, and we can always come back at them with statistics'.

Sebastian Payne

The Home Office immigration vans – successful and popular with the nation?

Are those Home Office vans targeting illegal immigrants universally disliked? The outcry from when the vans first took to the streets — notably #racistvan on Twitter — would suggest so but new polling from YouGov shows a disconnect between what those in politics and media think and the rest of the country. Over half of those polled this week support the vans, up eight points when last questioned in July: Two thirds also stated they disagreed that the vans were racist, up five points since the last batch of polling, while only 34 per cent thought they were offensive and stupid. The campaign group Liberty were certainly offended; they were disgruntled enough to commission their own van.

Isabel Hardman

Party donations highlight risk to Labour of union link reform

The Electoral Commission's latest release on donations to political parties in the second quarter of 2013 are quite handy for the Tories. Firstly, there's the caveat that no party really benefits from discussing funding because everyone ends up looking a little bit grubby, and because the only thing grubbier and more unattractive to voters would be full state funding of political parties, then this will always be a grubby-looking business. So of course there are donations from big business to the Conservative party (although the biggest individual donor to the Tories was in fact a woman who wanted to donate money to the 'government of the day' in her will, which meant her legacy was divided between the two Coalition parties).

Alex Massie

Nate Silver on Scottish independence: Alex Salmond has “no chance”

Nate Silver, in Edinburgh to punt his new book, appears to have annoyed some Scottish nationalists today. The "polling guru" (according to all newspapers everywhere) has told the Scotsman that he thinks Alex Salmond's merry bunch of nationalists have 'no chance' of prevailing in next September's independence referendum. It is true that Scottish politics is not Mr Silver's area of special expertise. It is also true that I am not sure his views are necessarily all that important. They do not carry top-weight in this handicap. I am not sure they merit being treated as some sort of Oracular revelation.

Isabel Hardman

Cheery silly season puts Tories on even keel

Even if Help to Buy is contributing to a bubble rather than the sensible restructuring of the economy that politicians promised before they started trying to scale that particular mountain, there are still reasons to be cheerful about the economy for the Tories this morning, on top of the delight offered yesterday by Chris Bryant's antics. The Guardian's ICM poll finds today that the Conservatives' approval rating on economic competence has risen to 40 per cent from 28 per cent in June. Labour has only crept up five points in comparison, from 19 per cent to 24 per cent. There are clearly all sorts of reasons why the party shouldn't be hanging out the bunting for 2015 just yet (Paul Goodman has a good post on this here).