Uk politics

Sunday

Isabel Hardman

Will the Lib Dems veto welfare cuts?

If the Lib Dem conference was all about proalition, the Conservatives seem determined to at least start their conference in a less coalicious frame of mind. This morning Chancellor George Osborne made very clear on Murnaghan on Sky News that he would not introduce either a wealth tax or a mansion tax: measures Nick Clegg has called for as the price of the Lib Dems supporting further welfare cuts. Osborne said: 'I don’t think either of those ideas are the right ones. I don’t think a mansion tax is the right idea because, I tell you, before the election it will be sold to you as a mansion tax and then after the election a lot of the people in Britain are going to wake up and find their more modest homes have suddenly been reclassified as a mansion.

James Forsyth

David Cameron gets political on Marr

David Cameron was in feisty form on the Andrew Marr Show  this morning. Cameron, who has finally woken up to the need to be more political, defended his record — including his decision to cut the top rate of tax — with vigour. Cameron stressed how the richest 10 per cent are paying 10 times more towards the cost of deficit reduction than the bottom 10 per cent. But he argued, correctly, that the 50p tax rate was dangerously uncompetitive. He said that he was determined ‘to always be fair and seen to be fair’ which suggests to me that some new tax on the rich, something the Liberal Democrats could call a wealth tax, is on the way. Although he ruled out a mansion tax and the Chancellor has said there’ll be no new council tax bands, there are other options.

Saturday

Shiraz Maher

Should British citizens expect British justice?

The High Court yesterday issued a final ruling on the extradition of Abu Hamza and four other men saying they will be handed over to American authorities to stand trial on terrorism charges. It’s unusual for the courts to lump different cases together like this, and that’s one of the things supporters of Babar Ahmad and Syed Talha Ahsan are particularly upset about. Abu Hamza’s case is relatively straightforward. He will be tried on 11 charges, including the charge that he tried to create a terrorist training camp in the United States. Two of the other men, Khaled al-Fawwaz and Adel Abdul Bary, are accused of being linked to Osama bin Laden and were indicted in relation to the 1998 twin embassy bombings in East Africa. This case is entirely unconnected to Abu Hamza.

Alex Massie

Abortion: Jeremy Hunt may be stupid, that doesn’t mean he’s wrong –

Jeremy Hunt: what a card! A row about abortion is just what the Conservative and Unionist party needs to kick-off its conference week! The MP for South West Surrey is certainly entitled to say he favours outlawing abortion outwith the first trimester; the Secretary of State for Health would have been wiser to have kept quiet. The problem is Hunt's political judgement, not his moral compass. Nevertheless, some of the reaction to Hunt's comments has bordered on the hysterical. Talk of a Tory "War on Women" is as ugly as it is absurd and another example of how the witless American brand of partisanship has leaked into our political discourse.

Freddy Gray

Deliver us, Lord

Why has David Cameron made his conference slogan 'Britain can deliver'? That word 'deliver' is revolting. Cameron clearly likes it: 'Britain delivered', he said after the Olympics. But if only Dave and his handlers read the Spectator's Dot Wordsworth more closely, they'd know better. In 2003, Dot wrote: 'Politicians and managers who use the word deliver should think again . Until recently, the most frequent use of the word deliver was in the phrase 'deliver us from evil.' The sense 'liberate, set free' had been conveyed by the Latin liberare . But in late Latin this meaning had been taken over by the emphatic deliberare, which in classical Latin meant 'to weigh well. 'So I suppose there would have been a late Latin Dot Wordsworth complaining of the misuse of liberare ..

Fraser Nelson

Michael Gove: why I’ll never run for leader

Today's Guardian magazine runs a Michael Gove profile, colouring him blue on the cover as if to alert readers to the threat he poses. "Smoother than Cameron," it warns. "Funnier than Boris. More right-wing than both. Are you looking at the next leader of the Tory Party?" There is nothing unusual about leadership speculation following a  prominent Tory frontbencher, but there is something unusual about the way Gove has ruled it out in almost any way imaginable. He has combined General Sherman and Estelle Morris, saying he wouldn't and couldn't do  the job. It is now being said that Gove is protesting too much, but he has been clear about this for years. I'll add my tuppenceworth. Gove was once, briefly, my news editor at The Times.

Friday

Matthew Pennycook

Universal uncertainty

Brushing aside recent criticism of his universal credit scheme, Iain Duncan Smith claimed that nothing now 'demoralised' him. After surviving two years of gruelling denigration as Conservative Party leader, he can perhaps be taken at his word. Yet the line between a thick skin and complacency is a thin one. For all the sniping from opponents, the Work and Pensions Secretary would be wrong to ignore the very real threats that confront his flagship scheme. One of the more striking aspects of Universal Credit which has so far failed to make the headlines is that from April 2014, financial support for people already in work will become conditional rather than automatic, just as it is for jobseekers today.

James Forsyth

The real story of the 2007 ‘election that never was’

‘The election that never was’ is one of the most important events, or non-events, in recent British political history; if it had gone ahead, David Cameron might never have become Prime Minister and there might not have been a coalition at all. Equally, Gordon Brown could have seen Labour’s majority slashed and had to quit long before the financial crisis hit. The story of what happened that day has been told several times. But I don’t think I’ve read a more gripping account than Damian McBride’s. McBride did disgrace himself but he can sure as hell write. If you like the political game, you really sure read it.

Isabel Hardman

Senior Tories pile pressure on Cameron to chase core vote

David Cameron has a tough task ahead of him for this week's Conservative conference - a task that got a little harder when Ed Miliband surprised almost everyone by producing a cracking speech this week. The Prime Minister has a number of problems to tackle when he arrives in Birmingham. These include a rowdy party growing increasingly agitated about a number of issues including Europe, a chief whip sent in to control said rowdy party whose authority has been undermined before he has even started twisting arms, a chancellor struggling with his own authority on economic policy, and a Mayor determined to steal the show with his own conference speech and his building campaign against Heathrow expansion.

Julian Huppert Mp

Why the ‘snooping’ Communications Data Bill will not pass through Parliament

I believe in evidence-based policy, and if the Home Office or anyone else claims that they need new powers over the people of this country, the onus is on them to demonstrate what they need and why. They should never assume that they will always get what they want, simply because they ask for it. Politicians owe it to the people to question the needs, not just roll over and concede our hard-earned freedoms on request. Obviously there is always a balance to be struck when deciding how many powers to give the state. We benefit from having an effective police force - but give the police too many powers, and we put too many restrictions on people's freedoms. Orwell's 1984 is the terrible consequence.

Thursday

Isabel Hardman

Five lessons from the Labour party conference

Believe it or not, Labour's party conference has finally ground to a halt. Here are the key lessons from the past six days in Manchester: 1. Ed Miliband is no longer a joke leader of the opposition. The Labour leader's speech showed that he can now talk a good game, and even though much of that performance was no more than a good game, Miliband gave his party and voters a glimpse of the more authoritative figure that he has grown into over the past two years. It's worth watching his speech to the 2010 autumn conference where he appeared completely floored by bursts of applause to see quite how far he has come. 2.

Jonathan Jones

Labour conference: Ed Miliband’s speech boosts his ratings

Labour leave Manchester today with a 14-point poll lead over the Conservatives, according to YouGov. That's their biggest lead in a YouGov poll since June, although one last week showed them 13 points ahead, so we shouldn't rush into declaring a big conference bounce for them. It does seem, though, that Ed Miliband himself did get a decent boost out of his hour-long speech on Tuesday. 10 per cent of people say they watched or listened to the whole thing, and a further 49 per cent say they've seen or heard reports about it. And it seems Ed did manage to change at least a few of their minds about him. 31 per cent now say he 'would be up to the job of Prime Minister' — still not a great number, but an improvement on the 25 per cent who said so last week.

Isabel Hardman

He’s behind you! Michael Gove is the pantomime villain who inspires Labour

There was plenty of panto on the conference floor this week in Manchester. Ed Miliband encouraged delegates to boo several villains in his speech, and one of them was Michael Gove. In fact, Michael Gove popped up as the villain on Tuesday and in the Labour leader's question-and-answer session yesterday, too, and again when Stephen Twigg spoke just before the close of the conference today. This is odd: of all the reforms that the coalition government has introduced so far, Gove's have been the least surprising to Labour members given he's pushing ahead with what Tony Blair and Andrew Adonis started. There was one baffling moment when a delegate started heckling a year 11 academy pupil who was delivering quite a lovely speech about her own schooling.

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman

Labour conference: Stephen Twigg to launch New Deal for teachers

It doesn't seem entirely fair that Stephen Twigg's speech has been left to the final day of the Labour conference, when many have packed up and left Manchester already. But today Labour's Shadow Education Secretary is to announce more reforms to education as part of the party's new One Nation project. The idea is to make teaching an 'elite profession for top graduates', and Twigg plans to achieve that by offering incentives for high-flyers to work in tough schools such as paying off some of their student debt, funding for teachers to do master's degrees and a National College for Teaching Excellence to develop new teaching standards. The centrepiece of this New Deal for teachers is a doubling in size of the popular and successful Teach First programme to 2,000 placements.

James Forsyth

Why the Cameroons have grounds for optimism

With Labour conference winding down, attention shifts to the Tories. They will head to Birmingham facing several challenges. First, the loss of the boundary changes means that winning a majority requires them to be on, at least, forty two per cent — six points up on where they were in 2010. Second, Ed Miliband has shown this week that he has more political life in him than many Tories appreciated. Third, the government’s reputation for competence has taken a beating over the past few months. But despite all this, one finds a renewed sense of confidence among the Cameroons. The listlessness of a few months ago has gone to be replaced by a sense of determined optimism. To my mind, things do look better for them than they did before the Olympics.

Isabel Hardman

Labour conference: Ed Miliband will attend TUC anti-austerity demo

If we learnt nothing else from this afternoon's question-and-answer session that Ed Miliband held with delegates, it's that Labour delegates are quite as eccentric as Liberal Democrat members, if not more so. The junior coalition partner has long enjoyed the reputation of having an eclectic following, but those gathered in Labour's hall had bought an equally surreal selection of props with them today. They were waving Welsh flags, builder's helmets, sparkly bags, light-up handheld fans, light-up pens, scarves, crutches, something that looked strangely like a strip light, flashing lights, and open umbrellas. The idea, as well as making the conference hall look rather like a bazaar, was to catch Ed Miliband's attention by vigorously waving said strange object.

The Spectator

Jeremy Hunt: no promises on the NHS ringfence

In this week's Spectator James Forsyth interviews new Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt about how he will continue Andrew Lansley's legacy on NHS reform. He says his 'burning mission' is to 'demonstrate that we have as much to offer the NHS as Labour ever did'. But while Hunt is keen to praise the work of his predecessor, he takes a strikingly different line on the health budget. James writes: Another striking difference between them is their views on the future of the NHS budget. When The Spectator interviewed Andrew Lansley at Christmas, he was clear that he believed that the health budget would have to carry on rising in real terms until, well, kingdom come — and that the next spending round and Tory manifesto would have to commit to that. Hunt is not prepared to guarantee this.

Isabel Hardman

Ed Miliband’s next big test as Labour leader

The good thing for Labour about Ed Miliband's speech yesterday was that he didn't talk about the deficit, or welfare or other thorny issues which make certain sections of the party very grumpy indeed. The Labour leader made only fleeting references to cuts to public services, too. So there was little to disagree on. It is when he comes to tackle issues such as these that Miliband will see his party mood sour considerably from its cheery response yesterday. The problem is that on these issues, the party is still struggling to work out how far it should go to meet voters' demands without betraying what it sees as its core values.

James Forsyth

The coalition take on Ed Miliband’s speech

Talking to senior Liberal Democrats and Conservatives about Ed Miliband’s speech, it is striking how similar their analyses of it are. Despite coalition, we’re entering into a period of stark government, opposition dividing lines. Pretty much everyone admits that Miliband has put to bed the question of his leadership of the Labour party and moved himself out of the IDS category. But they argue that he’s not dealt with Labour’s biggest weakness, the public’s belief that it spent and borrowed too much. One influential Liberal Democrat accused Miliband of ducking the generational challenge that is the deficit likening his speech to one in 1942 that didn't mention there was a war on.

Isabel Hardman

Richard Branson forces government into a great train U-turn

Sir Richard Branson is not a man who takes kindly to failing to get his own way. That was why few people were surprised by the Virgin boss' furious response to the government's decision to award the West Coast Mainline to his rivals First Group. It wasn't fair, he protested, and thousands of people seemed to agree, signing a petition criticising the decision. This morning it transpires that Branson's frenzied campaign against the contract actually led to the discovery of an enormous mistake at the heart of the bidding process. Civil servants checking their sums before a court case questioning the decision realise that they had in fact got those sums wrong. They had made mistakes in calculating the effect of inflation and passenger numbers.