Fraser Nelson

As Spectator readers know, James Forsyth is the most insightful and best-informed political columnist around. Today, he also becomes the best-read – starting a column in The Sun, the country’s favourite newspaper. It has dropped its paywall, so you can now read it here. His column is, as you’d expect, a mixture of his brilliantly-sourced insights into what’s really being said at the top table of British politics, along with the the freshest gossip. In his debut, he explains why the saying ‘Raqqa before Christmas’ is now going around the government, and the calculations that the Prime Minister is making ahead of a very risk vote.

Sweden, perhaps the most open country in the world, is on course to take almost 200,000 asylum seekers this year. Adjust for population size and that's like the UK taking a refugee city the size of Birmingham. It can't cope. Yet political refusal to admit this is incubating concern - sending voters towards the anti-immigrant Sweden Democrat parties. But most shockingly, a trend is emerging of attacks on immigrants. I look at this in my Daily Telegraph column today. [datawrapper chart="http://static.spectator.co.uk/qjCco/index.html"] Sweden's government and opposition parties both dislike talking about immigration; they are too quick to dismiss concerns as xenophobia.

Without George Osborne, we’d probably be living under Prime Minister Ed Miliband right now. His value to the government goes far beyond his brief as Chancellor; he is across most departments most of the time. But as Chancellor, he is judged by the success (or otherwise) of his Budgets – which is why he is now in a moment of great danger. His love of complexity has come to threaten not just his own reputation, but that of the Conservative Party too. Sometimes, Osborne is so clever that he can be downright stupid: This is one of these times. In my Telegraph column today, I say that Osborne is currently planning to soften – but not abandon – his tax credit cuts programme.

With a gossamer Tory majority in the Commons and no majority at all in the Lords, confrontation between the two chambers was always inevitable. Tonight's defeat over tax credits will be the first of many. But it would be a great error for the Conservative government to choose this as the issue over which to go to war with the Lords. For a start, their Lordships are right: taking tax credits away from low-paid workers, rather than phasing them out, is cruel and and unnecessary. Next, this was not in the Tory manifesto: the party said they would cut £12 billion but didn't say how — and had hinted that they would not do it by tax credits. But also, crucially, this battle threatens to retoxify the Conservatives. What does it say about Tory values?

I suspect that Mark Carney set out to strengthen the case for Britain staying in the European Union with his remarks in Oxford tonight, but his intervention may end up having the reverse effect. First, the Bank of England governor did not talk about the advantages of staying inside the EU. He spoke about the advantages of Britain being part of a free trade block; as Boris Johnson argues in the new Spectator this is still likely even if we vote to leave. Here’s what he said:- ‘Broadly speaking, the evidence suggests that the UK has successfully harnessed the benefits of openness afforded by its EU membership while avoiding some of the drawbacks of reduced flexibility from which some continental European economies suffer.

At the SNP conference the First Minister and her deputy, John Swinney, both had precisely the same thing to say about university. Here’s Swinney: “Students from a poorer background have never had a better chance of a place at university than under the SNP”. And Nicola Sturgeon: “More students from poorer backgrounds are now going to university”. More. That's the test they set: if more poor students are going to uni then the SNP is succeeding. They both talk about “university,” as distinct from other forms of further education. Yes, the ratio of poor kids at uni is rising in Scotland – but shamefully, it’s half the level of England. Worse, the gap is growing (see chart, above).

After the chaotic launch of the Britain Stronger in Europe campaign (didn’t they work out that having the acronym BSE is not a good idea?) the Scottish National Party has made its mind up: it’ll stay well clear of this. John Swinney, the SNP Deputy First Minister, has just been on BBC Radio Scotland laying out his reasons. Yes, he doesn’t like the idea of being part of a campaign that might involve the Conservative Party – but it’s about more than that. As the SNP can see, the ‘in’ campaign is turning out to be a rebadged version of ‘Project Fear’, the campaign that almost destroyed the union in last year’s Scottish independence referendum. It has the same people, even the same selebs (June Sarpong, for example).

Can a Conservative be ‘progressive’? In my Telegraph column last week, I argued that David Cameron is halfway to being one of the most progressive Prime Ministers in recent British history – and published a few graphs to make my case. This went down pretty badly with some CoffeeHousers, who said that I was applauding Cameron for being left-wing – if they wanted a bleating leftie, they’d have voted Labour. I take the point: the word ‘progressive’ is synonymous with ‘left-wing’ in America, as is the word ‘liberal’. But that’s the Americans’ problem. Granting the left ownership of the words ‘liberal’ and ‘progressive’ disguises two basic points.