Uk politics

Sunday

Isabel Hardman

Lib Dem conference: Danny Alexander and Oliver Letwin get cosy

From our UK edition

The big joke at the Social Market Foundation and TUC fringe this evening was that two of the panelists could have delivered one another's speeches. Those panelists were Oliver Letwin and Danny Alexander, who were both speaking about the government's economic plan, its infrastructure policy and how to achieve growth. When Danny came to speak, he told the audience that he agreed with and could have delivered all of Letwin's speech, and that the only thing the pair disagreed on was Europe. Alexander being so wonderfully cosy with Letwin might be a good thing for the coalition - and Letwin is know for being a Lib Dem-ish Tory. But it's a strange thing for the chief secretary to the Treasury to admit at his own party conference.

James Forsyth

Lib Dem conference: Nick Clegg says spending plans may be ‘re-jigged’

From our UK edition

There is something very Liberal Democrat about Nick Clegg’s Q&A session with party members at conference. There’s a distinct mix of familiarity, fondness—the loudest applause came for the announcement that today is Nick and Miriam’s 12th wedding anniversary and policy debate. In response to a questioner who claimed that Danny Alexander was more right wing than ‘Peter Osborne’, Clegg was keen to stress to members that the coalition’s fiscal plans were more flexible than they are given credit for.

Isabel Hardman

Lib Dem conference: Lib-Lab fringe praises pluralism

From our UK edition

Day one of the Lib Dem conference, and the Tory jokes have started. At a lunchtime fringe event, of Labour and Lib Dems, the lights suddenly faded out and the room was plunged into darkness. 'This must be the Tory cuts!' said Ming Campbell, and the panel discussion continued by the gloomy light of the fire escape signs. It was a fairly jovial affair, but the mixture of names – Sir Ming, Jon Cruddas, Jo Swinson and Andrew Adonis – raised the deadly serious proposition of a Labour-Lib Dem coalition after the next election.

Sebastian Payne

Lib Dem conference: Ed Davey says he’s ‘not for turning’ on a green future

From our UK edition

Though it was never going to make the earth move, Ed Davey's speech to the Liberal Democrat conference highlighted the party's push for differentiation on the green agenda. The Energy and Climate Change Secretary was clear that installing Owen Paterson, as the new Environment Secretary, would not stop the Lib Dems fighting for a green future and a green economy. 'Our Coalition agreement to clear up Britain's mess, wasn't an agreement to turn the clock back. For business as usual. To rekindle Thatcherism - or Blair-Brown. It was for a fairer, greener Britain - and we must fight for that. Earlier today, I moved the motion to pledge this party's backing for a global deal to stop climate change.

Isabel Hardman

Lib Dem conference: Tim Farron keeps it muted

From our UK edition

Tim Farron's speech to this year's autumn conference was rather muted compared to his effort in Birmingham last year. The Liberal Democrat president did take the opportunity to attack both Labour and the Tories, of course, because that is his job, but he did not talk about Conservatives speaking 'drivel', or about divorces. He described Labour's record in government as '13 years of a Labour government: what a mandate, what a disappointment', and delivered the obligatory Liberal Democrat attack on the banks.

James Forsyth

Lib Dem conference: Clegg will accept further welfare cuts but wants to squeeze rich more

From our UK edition

The opening act of any party conference is the interview for Sunday morning TV and Nick Clegg made clear to Andrew Marr that the welfare budget is ‘not immune from further savings.’ He also said that he was confident that he could persuade the Tories to agree to further ways to make the ‘rich’ pay more. But under pressure from Marr, he couldn’t provide any details on what form this new tax might take. In an attempt to damp down the continuing chatter about Vince Cable’s conversations with Ed Miliband, Clegg said that he was in regular touch with both Milibands, Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson.

Isabel Hardman

Coffee House Interview: David Hall-Matthews calls for Clegg to ‘get smarter’ at coalition

From our UK edition

David Hall-Matthews is the chair of the left-leaning grassroots grouping within the Liberal Democrats, the Social Liberal Forum. He explains his qualms about the way Nick Clegg is currently handling the coalition relationship to Coffee House readers, and calls on ministers to be bolder in calling for 'adjustments' to the government's economic policy.   As the coalition agreement was hammered out between the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives in May 2010, the grassroots machinery in the party was swiftly cranking to life. Four leading members of the Social Liberal Forum, then just a small group within the party comprising over a hundred members, raced to London to discuss their strategy as their party joined forces with an old enemy.

Saturday

James Forsyth

Rallying the Liberal Democrat faithful

From our UK edition

One of the striking features of the opening rally at Liberal Democrat conference was how it was figures from the left of the party who attacked Labour most vigorously. Simon Hughes, the deputy leader, scolded those who think that governing with Labour would be easy; pointing out that the parties are at odds on nuclear power, Trident, civil liberties and a whole host of other issues. While the party’s president Tim Farron demanded that Labour apologise for the expensive failure of the NHS PFI projects, the Iraq war and a whole host of other issues. Nick Clegg himself was on fairly confident form. He began with a couple of gags about his unlikely chart success.

James Forsyth

Don’t expect Nick Clegg to throw too many rocks at the Tories in Brighton

From our UK edition

The Lib Dem round of pre-conference interviews today shows where the party wants to look distinctive. It is tax ‘fairness’, greenery and social mobility on which it has decided to set its stall. One thing worth noting, though, is that Nick Clegg’s interview in The Independent does not rule out future welfare cuts. He tells Andy Grice that 'We are not going to do an across-the-board, two-year freeze of all benefits during this parliament'. This leaves the Liberal Democrats plenty of room for manoeuvre ahead of the autumn statement on December 5th. I expect that we won’t hear too much bashing of his coalition partners from the deputy Prime Minister himself at this conference.

Isabel Hardman

David Laws to announce increase in pupil premium

From our UK edition

The first minister up on the stage at the Liberal Democrat conference this afternoon is new education minister David Laws. He has an announcement which will please those in the audience: the party's flagship pupil premium will increase from £600 to £900 per child. This is what he is expected to say: 'I can announce today that next year the Pupil Premium will increase again. It will rise from £600 to £900 per child. Last year it paid for over 1.8 million pupils. Just think what we have done with that policy. A secondary school with 1,000 pupils, a third on the Pupil Premium, will be receiving around an extra £300,000 next year due to this Liberal Democrat pledge being delivered.

Friday

Melanie McDonagh

Andrew Mitchell’s Gate-gate: haven’t we all been there?

From our UK edition

All right, he’s eaten dirt. Andrew Mitchell, Chief Whip, has now apologised to the Prime Minister and apologised profusely to the policeman he may or may not have called a pleb. In a statement today – prudently, he declined offers of radio interviews – Mitchell admitted that he 'did not treat the police with the respect they deserve' when on Wednesday evening one of them refused to allow him to ride his bicycle out of the Downing Street gate and directed him instead to the pedestrian one. In the outburst that followed, he is said to have told the man that he didn’t run the government. Well, that makes two of them; neither does the Chief Whip.

Andrew Watts

Alex Salmond’s wind farm delusion

From our UK edition

Last year, in an interview with the Today programme, the chief executive of National Grid told the show’s no doubt stunned listeners that they would have to get used to not having electricity as and when they wanted it. That here in the developed world we should be wondering whether the lights will be going out in a few years time, whether our children will go to bed in the cold or whether we will spend our evenings shivering around log fires is rather amazing. That our political leaders have achieved this — if achieved is the right word — in the face of the shale gas revolution with its promise of cheap and abundant energy for centuries to come is truly extraordinary. How have we come to this?

Jonathan Jones

Borrowing figures are good and bad news for the government

From our UK edition

Today's public finance statistics are another case of good news/bad news for the government. First, the good news: the ONS revised down its estimate for government borrowing in the last fiscal year (2011/12) from £125 billion to £119.3 billion. That's £6.7 billion below the OBR's estimate in March this year, and means that the coalition succeeded in cutting the deficit by 25 per cent in its first two years (29 per cent in real terms). But the bad news comes when you look at the current fiscal year. The ONS estimates government borrowing for August at £14.41 billion — roughly the same as August 2011 (£14.37 billion). These estimates do tend to end up being revised heavily — by an average of £1.

James Forsyth

Nigel Farage’s real strategy

From our UK edition

Nigel Farage’s very public willingness to explore a UKIP-Tory electoral pact in exchange for a pledge from David Cameron to hold a referendum on EU membership is, I suspect, designed to achieve two things. First, it is meant to flush out Cameron. If Cameron declines the offer, Farage will be able to claim that only UKIP are the only party to vote for if you want an In/Out choice on the UK’s EU membership. It’ll undercut the Tory offer of a renegotiation referendum. Second, by floating the offer he makes it more likely that individual Tory MPs and candidates might sign up to the offer themselves, pledging to back an In Out referendum in exchange for no UKIP challenge.

Fraser Nelson

The death of the party conference

From our UK edition

The party conference season is now underway, with Lib Dems gathering in Brighton. It’s time to admit that our political parties are in a bad way, and this has nothing to do with voter apathy. Britain’s political culture is bursting with life, it’s the parties that are dying. This will be horribly apparent in the conferences. David Cameron couldn’t even fill the hall for his speech last year, the first time in living memory that this happened. This is no reflection on his (usually excellent) speeches but the decay of conferences in general. Since they moved to the cities, they became geared at those with expense accounts rather than membership cards.

Isabel Hardman

Thrasher Mitchell’s toxic tirade

From our UK edition

Andrew Mitchell spent two years detoxifying his image at the International Development department, wearing charity wristbands and talking about polio vaccines. But however much success he enjoyed in creating a persona of a reasonable, mild-mannered man concerned with poverty (and our leading article this week disputes whether the programmes he led were anywhere near as successful as that), the man known as 'Thrasher' trashed that reputation this week. The Sun reports that he raged 'You're f***ing plebs' at policemen who had the temerity to stop him from cycling out of the Downing Street gates.

Steerpike

Telling tales: some infamous conference moments

From our UK edition

What could possibly go wrong when you lock 10,000 political hacks and flacks in a hotel for 96 hours and let lobbyists pick up the tab? Well that's party conference for you, and there have been some excellent tales of drunken debauchery over the last few years. The most riotous parties are the ones upstairs in the private suites of the main conference hotel. Representing the Tory side, Lord Strathclyde fills his bathtub with ice and champagne and opens his doors every year. Rumour has it that he always deserves a magnum for later. Last year, one Tory MP went so far as to punch a colleague. Other MPs had to drag one of them away. It was  all denials the next day, but multiple witnesses reported that a woman was involved...

Isabel Hardman

Farage’s floundering highlights Cameron’s EU challenge

From our UK edition

By the end of his 8.10 interview on the Today programme, Nigel Farage was struggling a little. Once John Humphrys had taken him away from his hobby horse of a European Union Referendum, the UKIP leader started to wobble. Humphrys: Let's have a look at your policies. A bit puzzling, in a way, and it's not the first time a political leader has done this. You seem to want to cut back taxes, you want to roll back the state, and yet, you want to spend loads of money on loads of things. Farage: Well, we want to spend more money on defence, that is absolutely true, and we think, and we think… Humphrys: Student grants, you want to restore student grants, free eye tests, free dental care... Farage: Well, we think that what's happened to our defences is absolutely shameful.

Isabel Hardman

Burstow goes rogue to attack Treasury

From our UK edition

Hell hath no fury like a government minister sacked (as proven by our anonymous 'Dumped by Dave' piece this week). Another former minister, Paul Burstow, lost his job because Nick Clegg was miffed at the way the Lib Dem had failed to flag up the dangers in the Health and Social Care Bill. He'd already formed a habit of briefing against his own department when he was in office, so it's no great shock that Burstow has decided to dish the dirt on the Treasury in the Telegraph today, claiming it is responsible for blocking reform of the social care system. He writes: 'Of course, if fixing this was easy the last Labour Government would have done it in those halcyon days when Chancellor Brown told us he had ended boom and bust. So, why did Labour fail?

Isabel Hardman

Coffee House Interview: Chris Skidmore on Britannia Unchained, ‘lazy’ Brits, and how the government should be unpopular

From our UK edition

Before it had even appeared in reviewers' postbags, the book that Chris Skidmore co-authored with four other Conservative MPs had created quite a stir in Westminster. 'Brits so lazy', said the Sun, about a chapter in Britannia Unchained which describes the British as being 'among the worst idlers in the world'. That claim provoked rage from left-wingers, with Labour's Chuka Umunna calling on David Cameron to 'distance himself' from the comments, which he said were 'deeply insulting'. But Skidmore seems entirely unperturbed by the outcry. In fact, when we meet in his Westminster office, he seems quite taken with the idea that politicians should take a great deal of unpopularity on the chin.