Uk politics

Thursday

James Forsyth

Labour’s high risk, high reward strategy on national insurance

From our UK edition

Labour today has tried to shift the National Insurance debate from whether you should cut waste to prevent a tax rise, to whether the Tories’ sums add up. When the Tories announced their plan to avoid the worst of Labour’s NICs rise by cutting waste they made a conscious decision not to offer details on how they would make these efficiency savings. As one shadow Cabinet minister explained to me, they had no desire to repeat the experience of the James Review when they were going on Newsnight to argue the toss over individual savings. The Tories think that the argument that government can save one pound in every hundred that it spends is credible and that combined with the endorsement of two men who have advised the government on efficiency so recently is enough.

Peter Hoskin

The VAT dividing line is growing deeper

From our UK edition

Is this a pledge we can count on?  After the Lib Dems suggested they wouldn't increase VAT earlier, the Labour Chief Whip has told ITV's Lucy Manning that his party won't either.  If so, it's quite a turnaround from when both Darling and Cable refused to rule out VAT hikes during last week's Chancellor's debate. I wouldn't be surprised if we see a LibLab pincer movement against the Tories now: the two parties who seem to have ruled out VAT hikes against the one which is being being slightly more equivocal about it.  As I said earlier, it would hardly be edifying politics.  But the real worry is if it dissuades politicians from talking sensibly about how to fill our country's fiscal black hole.

Daniel Korski

Win one for the Gipper

From our UK edition

A Cameron government has the potential to change Britain - but not much else beside.  A Tory loss, however, could change much more. The Cameron Tories are a bellwether for Conservative movements in a number of countries, including the US. If they succeed, they will prove a powerful model for many moderate Republicans who believe their party is in an earlier post-Major phase - angry, divided and negative. If David Cameron fails to defeat Gordon Brown, few Republicans will look across to their British cousins for inspiration. The party will eschew any modernising project for a while longer and stick to their equivalent of IDS. In this scenario, the Republicans will pick up some congressional seats and governorships.

Peter Hoskin

Your guide to Labour’s latest attack

From our UK edition

So much for the positive vision.  Labour have spent most of the day attacking the Tories and their national insurance cut.  You'd have heard Brown trying to wheel out statistics about it during his Today Programme interview. And then the PM's press conference, alongside Peter Mandelson and Alistair Darling, reduced to a How The Tories' Sums Don't Add Up session. One thing that's striking about the latest attacks is how Labour are slipping, with calculated ease, between different figures to represent the efficiency savings that the Tories hope will fund their NI policy.  Here's a quick guide to the numbers, so you know what's what: £6 billion: This is roughly how much the Tories think the Exchequer will lose from their national insurance plan.

James Forsyth

Hope springs eternal

From our UK edition

The Tory press conference this morning, launching their plan for National Citizen Service, shows how they hope to run a two track campaign. On the one hand, they want to be hammering Labour over their plans to increase National Insurance — Cameron called it a ‘a recovery killer, an economy killer, a job killer’ and said that Labour wanted people to pay ‘taxes for government waste’. On the other, they want to be presenting hopeful, optimistic ideas like a National Citizen Service. This fusion campaigning enables the Tories both to be attacking Labour and presenting themselves as the party that is offering a positive alternative. National Citizen Service is very Cameron. He’s been toying with the idea since 2005.

Fraser Nelson

Woolas on the rack

From our UK edition

Phil Woolas has just been confronted on Daily Politics about immigration figures which we uncovered on Coffee House yesterday, showing 99 percent of new jobs since 1997 are accounted for by immigration. His response is (unintentionally) hilarious. He is immigration minister, yet appears not to know what immigration figures mean. Here's the transcript: Phil Woolas: I think that the Spectator's analysis, perhaps not surprisingly, is confusing two completely separate things Andrew Neil: These are Office of National Statistics figures.which we checked this morning. Do you accept that there are 1.7 million new jobs for people of working age between 16 and 64, correct? PW: Yes AN: And according to the Labour Force Survey, compiled by the Office of National Statistics. 1.

Daniel Korski

The hyperbole of Westminster

From our UK edition

Campaigns are conducted in poetry, former New York mayor Mario Cuomo once said. This one seems to be conducted in hyperbole. Every party is doing their level best to show that there is a difference, and a big one, between them and their opponents. That's normal. But to do so, they are stretching good arguments beyond what is sustainable. "Brownies" may be a particular mendacious form of hyporbolic campaigning (and governing),  but there are bound to be a few Tory and Lib Dem exaggerations on display during the campaign. Exhibit A. The Tories say a hung parliament will doom Britain as the markets will react badly to a potentially unstable government - with ruinous consequences. Exhibit B. Labour is at it too.

James Forsyth

Civil service discussing Tory efficiency savings

From our UK edition

Laura Kuenssberg of the BBC is reporting that senior civil servants met this morning to discuss how they would implement the Tory plans for efficiency savings. Now, it is not surprising that the civil service is discussing how to implement the opposition’s plans. But what is intriguing is who told the BBC about the meeting. If it was the Tories, then no surprise. But if it was the civil service who told the BBC about it, then that would indicate that they want it to be known that they think these efficiencies are possible. My hunch, and it is no more than that, is that it was civil servants who told the BBC. I can’t imagine that the BBC news channel at noon would be treating it as breaking news if they had heard it from the Tories.

David Blackburn

The strange case of Charlie Whelan’s Commons pass

From our UK edition

Well, now we know. Charlie Whelan enjoys the liberty of Westminster at the invitation of the parliamentary Labour party. Guido points out that it’s highly unlikely Whelan isn’t officially connected to Labour’s campaign. Labour tried to keep all this quiet, attempting to avert an ‘affluence for influence’ story that might undermine Brown’s attempt to turn the election into a referendum on Lord Ashcroft. However, though this should prove bad news for Labour, these stories have little impact outside Westminster. Neither the Ashcroft scandal nor previous Whelan sagas moved the polls.

Peter Hoskin

Labour firing blanks

From our UK edition

Labour's press conference this morning was a classic example of a party struggling to both have its cake and eat it.  Not only did we get Gordon Brown, as expected - but he was introduced, and joined, by Alistair Darling and Peter Mandelson.  Three heavy hitters to bash out one message: that the Tories' national insurance plans are a "threat to the recovery".  Or make that one-and-a-half messages, if you include the claim that the Tories couldn't realistically expect to make the efficiency savings to fund their NI cut this year.  There is, claimed the Labour triumverate, a "black hole" where the Tories' tax and spending proposals should be.     And this was where the cake-eating came into play – with a vengeance.

Peter Hoskin

What a difference the start of a campaign makes

From our UK edition

In last week's Chancellor's debate, Vince Cable refused to rule out raising VAT to help fix the public finances.  Now, only a few days later, the Lib Dems are pledging not to do that.  What's more, they're saying that the Tories' plans require a raise in VAT.  And they've even got a 'VAT bombshell' poster to drive the message home. There's more than a dash of Brownite politics about this - the same seasoning I detected in the Tories' Death Tax poster.  Sure, there have been rumblings that the Tories will raise VAT.  But Osborne & Co. have denied that this is necessarily the case in recent days, and it's certainly not current Tory policy.  So the Lib Dems are effectively spinning a lie, and attacking that lie.

Peter Hoskin

Brown comes under heavy fire on Today

From our UK edition

Woah. I doubt Brown will endure many tougher twenty-minute spells during this election campaign than his interview with on the Today Programme this morning. You could practically hear the crunching of his teeth, as John Humphrys took him on over Labour's economic record; practically smell the sweat and fear dripping down his brow. It was compulsive, and compelling, stuff. Humphrys started by putting a grim story to Brown: that his "handling of the economy was not prudent ... your record suggests that the economy is not safe in your hands."  The PM's mission was to deny all this, and he did so with his usual stubborness and disingenuity.  His pitch here was all about inflation: about how we'd avoided the high inflation of recessions past, and how we should be grateful for that.

Fraser Nelson

Where the Mail’s cover story came from

From our UK edition

It's always gratifying to see Coffee House posts followed up in the newspapers, and I almost admire the way the Daily Mail has just splashed the newspaper on one of our posts without mentioning the source. CoffeeHousers will recognise the story on the Mail's front page (left) - some 99 percent of jobs created since 1997 are accounted for by immigration. But the reader is left wondering where this figure came from. Was it released by the ONS? Erm, no. The only source for these figures is an email I was kindly sent by the ONS after specifically requesting the data. I used it in a line from The Spectator's editorial endorsement of the Conservatives, which we flagged up in a CoffeeHouse post at 11am yesterday. The Tories spotted it, and Damian Green raised it in PMQs at 12.28pm.

Wednesday

Peter Hoskin

A heckle which might reverberate across the campaign

From our UK edition

Mark the date: the first major heckle of the election campaign happened today, and Gordon Brown was the victim.  The perp was one Ben Butterworth, and he was angry at how his children can't get into their choice of state school – a frustration which will be shared by thousands of parents across the country.  I wonder what they'll think when they see that Brown ignored the man. The Tories will seize on this with considerable joy.  Their plans for widening school choice are – as the leader says in tomorrow's magazine – the best reason for voting Conservative.  Mr Butterworth might just have made himself the poster boy for that argument.

Peter Hoskin

Is this how Brown hopes to defuse the Tories’ national insurance cut?

From our UK edition

Well, the manifesto pledges sure are spilling out of Brown today.  After his proposals for cleaning up politics earlier, he's now told Channel 4's Gary Gibbon that Labour will pledge to keep the main rate of income tax at 20 pence in the forthcoming Parliament.  Whether that will satisfy those who would see their national insurance contributions rise over the same period, or placate those who were moved from a 10p tax rate to the 20p rate as a result of Brown's politicking a few years ago, remains to be seen.

David Blackburn

Bolton’s nobody’s backyard

From our UK edition

Fresh from a turbulent plane journey, David Cameron is stalking around Bolton. As Pete notes, Warburtons is Bolton's family owned bakery and its endorsement may prove significant in a region of marginals. The party that wins Bolton North East wins the election – that has been the case in every election since 1950 except in 1979. Ruth Kelly’s old haunt, Bolton West, is no Labour stronghold either: her replacement, Julie Hilling, is defending a nominal majority of 2,064. These two seats come 115 and 114 respectively on the Tories’ target list. To the north lies Rossendale and Darwen, where boundary changes have benefitted the Tories for once; it is 77th on the list.

Peter Hoskin

How the Tories are decontaminating their associations with Big Business

From our UK edition

Over the past couple of years, Big Business (as in, "being in hock with...") has been deployed almost as an insult against the Tories.  But they've now used their campaign on national insurance to turn their business associations into an advantage.  Exhibit A: the above picture (via PoliticsHome) of Cameron's visit to the Warbutons HQ in Bolton, where the company owner has come out in support of Tory proposals.  It sends the message that Big Business doesn't just mean the financial services, and a lot of people, in a lot of regions, rely heavily upon it for their livelihoods.  And too right, too.  Expect plenty more like this from the Tories over the next few weeks.

Peter Hoskin

A picture of innocence?

From our UK edition

Gordon Brown's visit to the Innocent smoothie HQ in London today is the subject of a great post from Paul Waugh, who reveals how close the PM came to a photo-opp nightmare.  But it also reminded me of this insight from Jonathan Freedland a few months ago, which I blogged at the time: "[The Labour campaign team have] taken a look at the branding of Innocent smoothies, hoping the authentic, unspun look might fit their own 'unairbrushable' product, G Brown." I wonder whether Innocent picked up any branding tips from Brown earlier, in return...

Peter Hoskin

The context defeats Brown

From our UK edition

So, mending our broken politics has been shoved to the forefront of the election campaign - at least for the time being. Brown has just given a speech on the issue, which - if you divorce it from all context - was actually fairly effective. Sure, things like reducing the voting age to 16, or a referendum on the alternative voting system, may not be your - or many people's - cup of chai. But there were several proposals which, taken in isolation, will probably be as popular as they are sensible: banning MPs from working for lobbying comapanies, for instance. Or giving the voters the ability to recall MPs who are guilty of gross financial misconduct. But Brown's problem is that his offer isn't divorced from all context.

Lloyd Evans

Last orders | 7 April 2010

From our UK edition

The choppers, and the whoppers, were flying at Westminster today. David Cameron invited the prime minister to try a spot of accountability at PMQs. Would he admit that he scrimped on transport aircraft in Helmand? Brown, with breathtaking cheek and not a little rhetorical dexterity, flipped the question upside down. ‘I do not accept that our commanding officers gave the wrong advice,’ he said and insisted that he never sent underequipped troops into battle. He clarified this with a smokescreen. ‘I take full responsibilitiy but I also take the advice of our commanding officers.’ Here was the morality of the restaurant freeloader, accepting the food but passing the bill down the table. Cameron leapt on it. ‘That answer sums up this premiership.