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.
From our UK edition
The European response to David Cameron’s immigration speech last week was pretty positive, but at some point between now and the formal renegotiation, someone was going to chuck a fly in the ointment. Last night Poland’s deputy foreign minister Rafal Trzaskowski told Newsnight that his country would have a ‘red line’ against Britain treating immigrants
From our UK edition
How much of a role should the government have in building homes? The vogue these days is for talking about localist solutions and helping the private sector to grow, but today Danny Alexander signalled a significant shift in the other direction. As he launched the 2014 National Infrastructure Plan, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury
From our UK edition
George Osborne is choreographing his autumn statement week to make things as difficult as possible for Labour. At present senior ministers are travelling the country handing out nice things to voters as they unveil details of the 2014 National Infrastructure Plan. Yesterday’s roads bonanza has been replaced by a garden city, better flood defences and
From our UK edition
Labour is very pleased with the amount of attention it garnered for its new private schools policy when Tristram Hunt unveiled it last week. So it was natural that the Shadow Education Secretary used this as his main line of attack at today’s Education Questions. He set the scene first using one of his shadow
From our UK edition
George Osborne has been looking forward to this particular Autumn Statement for a while because it is the opportunity for him and other colleagues to tour the country like Santa with a large infrastructure sack, handing out £15bn of road improvements to marginal constituencies and helping voters feel as though the recovery is making their
From our UK edition
It’s very fashionable these days to be despondent about the quality of our politicians. They’re all lazy liars who look only to their interests and neglect their duties to their constituents because they’d rather be grunting and snorting around a trough before sticking their snouts in it. And while the expenses scandal, resignations and court
From our UK edition
Fridays in the House of Commons Chamber are rarely edifying experiences, and today a number of MPs and campaigners are very exercised that two backbenchers managed to talk out a private members’ bill which claimed to give tenants better protection against so-called ‘revenge evictions’. These evictions are when a tenant complains about the leaking bath
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I’m not sure why everyone is so enraged by the pictures of fighting, shouting and arrests from Black Friday. British people have been exhibiting this sort of behaviour for years, whether it be at the open doors of a shop holding a sale or even trying to get into a Tube carriage (I was elbowed
From our UK edition
One of the aims of David Cameron’s big immigration speech was to settle the issue with his backbenchers before returning to talk about the economy. Based on conversations I’ve had this morning with the key movers and shakers in the eurosceptic wing of the Tory party, he hasn’t got very close to settling the issue
From our UK edition
David Cameron has just finished delivering his ‘game changing’ immigration speech. A lot of it was a narration of why immigration had made Britain the country it is, but why some voters were uncomfortable with it. You can read the full text here, but here’s the speech summarised in five quick points: listen to ‘David Cameron’s
From our UK edition
If David Cameron’s speech today is more about backbench management than it is about his desperate desire to talk about immigration, then he needs to make sure that what he says is enough to satisfy most in his party. His aides and PPS Gavin Williamson were calling round key MPs last night to give them
From our UK edition
David Cameron will make his ‘game-changer’ speech on immigration tomorrow in which he is expected to say that the UK will leave the EU if it does not secure reforms that allow the government to deny benefits to migrants. He will say: ‘If we cannot put our relationship with the EU on a better footing,
From our UK edition
Toby Rowland didn’t have the ‘wit, imagination or inclination’ to invent the account he produced of Andrew Mitchell calling police officers ‘plebs’ at the gates of Downing Street. In any other circumstances that description would be rather devastating, but today it must have sounded rather sweet for the police officer when Mr Justice Mitting uttered
From our UK edition
We are still waiting for David Cameron’s immigration speech, expected ‘this week’. The Conservatives tried to get their apology in early for failing to meet their target to get net migration into the ‘tens of thousands’, with a series of interventions starting this summer in which top Cabinet ministers started to highlight the problems with
From our UK edition
It is quite normal in British politics for a political party to turn on itself after an election defeat — but the Tories now seem to be preparing themselves for civil war in the unlikely event of victory. Already, the tribes are forming and snarling at each other. As ever, Europe is the casus belli.
From our UK edition
One of the major themes of this year’s big Tory reshuffle was the attempt to detoxify certain policy areas where a minister was involved in a stand-off with certain groups the Tory party would quite like to vote for them. Michael Gove lost his job as Education Secretary for this reason, and so too did
From our UK edition
We still don’t know when David Cameron’s long-awaited ‘game-changer’ speech on immigration will be. Downing Street is only saying that it will be ‘before Christmas’, but it is still expected to be this week. Nick Clegg certainly thinks it is soon, as he’s been putting his own thoughts about today, saying he’ll support benefit curbs
From our UK edition
‘Oooooh!’ shouted MPs when Mark Reckless got to his feet today at Prime Minister’s Questions for his first chance as a Ukipper to grill David Cameron. The newly-re-elected MP had looked rather nervous for most of the session as he bobbed up and down trying to get the Speaker’s attention, but he probably didn’t need
From our UK edition
Today is the day ministers set out their new counter-terrorism legislation following Theresa May’s revelations on Monday about the number of thwarted terror attacks and yesterday’s publication of the ISC report into the murder of Lee Rigby. The new laws will include obligations for schools and universities to combat extremism but there is also a
From our UK edition
Tristram Hunt has managed to get a great deal of attention for his proposals for private schools helping out state schools, with even his own (private but sufficiently stuffed with Socialist children to be OK) alma mater getting rather annoyed at what it calls a ‘tasteless’ policy which espouses ‘what some might deem an offensive bigotry’. In
