Isabel Hardman is assistant editor of The Spectator and author of Why We Get the Wrong Politicians. She also presents Radio 4’s Week in Westminster.
This week, the two main parties plan to make iconic pledges that they hope will appeal to their core vote, but that are pretty poor policy. David Cameron will today pledge to keep ‘pensioner perks’ – universal benefits for older voters such as the free bus pass and the winter fuel payment – while Labour
Politicians know they need to be more natural, less spun, and more honest about what they think. But most of them carry on sounding unnatural, spin-doctored and cagey because they’re worried about the media will do to them if they speak their minds. They fear being pounced upon by journalists keen to write up their
Could Labour’s tuition fees policy be its own tuition fees moment, of the same order as the moment it endlessly needles the Lib Dems about? Well, the decision, when it’s made, won’t have the same dramatic effect as the Lib Dem about turn in 2010, because Labour candidates haven’t been posing with signed pledges and
It’s pretty tough to find good news in suicide statistics, but today’s figures for 2013 are particularly grim reading. The number of suicides increased from 2012, and the male suicide rate is now at its highest since 2001. The male rate of suicide has increased significantly since 2007, where it stood at 16.6 deaths per 100,000
Ed Miliband has sent an angry letter to David Cameron this afternoon, demanding that he ‘set out in detail a reform agenda for the EU and a strategy for building the alliances needed to deliver it’. Now, David Cameron is quite used to receiving angry letters about Europe, but mostly they come from members of
Michael Fallon is worried about Vladimir Putin repeating his tactics in Ukraine with other countries. The Defence Secretary told newspapers that he was ‘worried about his pressure on the Baltics, the way he is testing Nato’. This morning Nick Clegg said that while there was ‘no evidence right now’ that the Russian President was seeking
Will the Tories really dock benefits from obese people and those with drug or alcohol addictions if they refuse treatment? Even though David Cameron reaffirmed his commitment to the policy in his speech in Hove yesterday, anyone who is getting rather over-excited about it could probably expend their energy on something else as this looks
Opponents of plain packaging for cigarettes are trying to work out how to derail the vote in the Commons introducing the law, Coffee House has learned. There is considerable frustration in the party that plain packaging is being introduced so close to the election, as MPs feel it is a distraction from the campaign. Other
Here are some observations from the ‘incendiary’ letter from the House of Bishops that has upset the Tories so much. ‘Our electoral system often means that the outcomes turn on a very small group of people within the overall electorate. Greater social mobility and the erosion of old loyalties to place or class mean that
Presumably as a way of getting out of an endless debate about receipts, Ed Balls has issued a letter with some detailed questions about tax evasion and HSBC (as opposed to tax avoidance and window cleaners). The letter asks three questions: 1. Why has there only been one prosecution out of 1,100 names? Was the
Well, those tax attacks worked out well, didn’t they? Tax avoidance is on the front pages of the newspapers, but not in a way that benefits either main political party. Even though George Osborne’s guide to minimising your tax bill has gone viral, Labour isn’t benefitting because it has ended up talking about receipts for
Are we now closer to Grexit? Tonight’s talks between eurozone finance ministers broke up after a few hours with Greece slamming the draft statement prepared by the group as ‘unacceptable’ and ‘unreasonable’. That statement was leaked by the Greek camp while the talks were happening, which can’t have helped the atmosphere in the room. The
As well as keeping the tax avoidance row going for as long as possible (something that is worrying Tories, who think their party needs to find a way of moving the conversation on from a toxic issue as quickly as possible), Ed Miliband also unveiled a potential new campaign message at his speech today. He
Quite naturally, the latest foray by Labour into pointing fingers at Tory tax avoiders has led to two scraps, firstly about Labour’s own donors and their tax affairs (as James predicted on Thursday) and secondly about whether or not paying your builder in cash is illegal. The last time the second row blew about Westminster,
What’s wrong with our politics? Now that more and people are turning to ‘anti-politics’ parties, this question is becoming steadily more fashionable and urgent. It’s now even got its own BBC Three documentary (the ultimate sign that an issue is dead serious, natch), called An Idiot’s Guide to Politics, presented by Jolyon Rubinstein from the
Ed Miliband’s party has ended up having a reasonably good week, even though it’s been a pretty tough battle. Today’s front pages have not been good at all, something the party leader’s supporters are obviously disappointed by, but given the story about a comparison between the row about Lord Fink’s tax affairs and the hacking
Even though Boris is building up support for his leadership campaign, he doesn’t want to have to stand in one this year. He needs David Cameron to remain Prime Minister after the General Election, and, as James reported recently, then take over following an EU referendum. That’s perhaps why the Mayor seemed quite keen on
Last night’s meeting of the 1922 Committee was, I hear, not a particularly well-attended affair. This is odd because the speaker was Lynton Crosby, whose confident briefings tend to cheer Tory MPs up no end. But sources who were there say there no more than about 30 MPs in attendance. Crosby gave a short presentation
Ed Miliband has now repeated what he said about Lord Fink in the Commons. At the end of his speech, he said: ‘Yesterday Conservative donor Lord Fink challenged me to stand by what I said in the House of Commons, that he was engaged in tax avoidance activities. I do. And believe it or not,
So it looks as though that Ed Miliband has won his battle with Lord Fink. The Tory peer has given an interview to the Evening Standard in which he says he did use ‘vanilla’ tax avoidance measures. He told the newspaper: ‘The expression tax avoidance is so wide that everyone does tax avoidance at some