Wales

Blue collars are all the rage in the Tory party these days, which makes Stephen Crabb a very fashionable cabinet minister. He was brought up in a Welsh council house by his mother, a single parent. His political views were shaped by seeing the way in which Thatcher’s reforms transformed his neighbourhood. He still believes Conservative values give the best hope for working-class and Welsh voters. As George Osborne leads an ever-deeper raid on Labour territory, we can expect to see and hear a lot more from people like Stephen Crabb. For the last year this confident 42-year-old has been Secretary of State for his native Wales, and his approach

I’ve just seen a poster from the NASUWT teaching union at a stall they have taken at this year’s Welsh Tory conference in Cardiff (where I am today). It suggests that the poor have it easier getting to university in Wales than in England because of the wicked ‘Westminster Coalition Government.’ This is an utterly dishonest poster. The poor, in Wales, have it worse – precisely because they rejected the redistributive policy of tuition fees. The poster espouses the facile logic that Ed Miliband has regurgitated today – that tuition fees somehow make the poor less likely to apply. The experience of another Celtic nation, Ireland, disproves that – they abolished fees in 1996 and a

It is interesting that neither Scotland nor Wales have been much bitten by the Ukip bug. The supposedly sensible view is that both of these countries are more kindly disposed towards the European Union than are the English — and that Ukip’s contempt for the European Parliament and its politicians is seen as another example of that rather too familiar English jingoism and xenophobia, commodities which are not terribly popular either north of Berwick or west of Monmouth. It is also sometimes mentioned that immigration is far less of an issue in Wales and Scotland — unless we are talking about English immigration, which does indeed tend to make the

In order to promote the Dylan Thomas in Fitzrovia festival, I am trying to persuade Jason Morell, the director, that he must help me come up with stunts. ‘It’s stunts that will get us into the meeja,’ I tell him. So we launch the ‘Dylan Thomas Fitzrovia Breakfast Challenge’. Gary Kemp, Tom Hollander, Owen Teale and myself swallow a glass of beer with a raw egg in it — the great Celtic bard’s preferred nutritional morning kick-off. We are supposed to film it and challenge three others to do the same in aid of inner-city charities, and thus news of our festival will spread like a west African disease. Nobody

It didn’t work. But it was a good idea. David Cameron prepared an ambush for Ed Miliband at PMQs today. The trouble was he attacked the Labour leader for a vice he himself has mastered with conspicuous aplomb: question dodging. Miliband is clearly in trouble. He’s using his only remaining strength, the NHS, to prop up his burgeoning weaknesses. Expect this to continue till next May. There’s always a calamity somewhere in the NHS and for Miliband, ill tidings are like gold dust. He painted a picture of a basket-case health system that would have shamed a failed state in the Middle Ages. Cameron, he said, wasted billions on a

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_11_Sept_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Fraser Nelson, Tom Holland and Leah McLaren discuss how we can still save the Union” startat=50] Listen [/audioplayer]Once upon a time, a long while ago, I lived in Dublin. It was a time when everything seemed possible and not just because I was younger then. The country was stirring too. When I arrived it was still the case that a visa to work in the United States was just about the most valuable possession any young Irishman or woman could own; within a fistful of years that was no longer the case. Ireland was changing. These were the years in which the Celtic Tiger was born. They were