As Fraser said earlier, we’ve got a great piece by Mihir Bose in the latest issue of the mag on British football’s debt crisis. I would normally say that non-football fans should look away now, but the story is so redolent of the entire financial crisis that it’s worth any CoffeeHouser’s time. What you’ll find
Brace yourselves. There’s going to be poll after poll after poll in the weeks leading to the election. And the onslaught starts in the Sun today, with the first of their YouGov daily tracker polls. It is also the first to be conducted in the aftermath of the Brown and Morgan interview. So what’s the
I know there’s a danger of expending too many words on poster campaigns, so just a quick post to flag up the designs the Tories launched this morning. There’s one of them above, and two more based on the same theme – “I’ve never voted Tory before, but…” – which you can see here. To
There’s plenty of buzz this morning about George Osborne’s new policy proposal: allowing public sector workers to run schools, job-centres, hospitals and other services as cooperatives. James Crabtree, Tim Montgomerie and Spectator.co.uk’s very own Martin Bright have exhaustive posts on why this might work in practice. It is, as they all suggest, pretty radical stuff.
So what next for the new, more human, Gordon Brown (as seen on TV)? Well, according to today’s Times, there are some ministers who want him to take the show on the road. The idea is to let voters tackle Brown directly – but about the topics Piers Morgan kinda skipped over: the economy, MPs’
Statistics about educational inequality in this country always tend to shock and dismay in equal measure. And this latest piece of research from Michael Gove’s office is no exception: “New analysis by the Conservatives shows that just 45 pupils on Free School Meals (FSM) make it to Oxford or Cambridge each year. One top London
Maybe it’s just a slow Saturday, but the Conservatives’ latest WebCameron video (see below) strikes me as one of the most effective yet. The pitch is straightforward: make an appeal to people who voted New Labour or who “have never voted Tory before”. So things like Sure Start and the minimum wage get a namecheck.
Has another dividing line faded into the sand? It sure looks like it, going off this Times report on how both Labour and the Tories are considering hiking VAT to 20 percent. If you recall, it was thought that Brown blocked Alistair Darling’s plan to introduce the rise in last year’s Pre-Budget Report – and
There must be something about stepping back onto Scottish soil that invigorates Alistair Darling, because his Edinburgh speech is one of the most political and confrontational he has delivered for some time. Sure, Darling is a Labour man, so it’s part of his job to oppose the Tories. But, compared to his Cabinet colleagues, he’s
Hat-tip: Tim Montgomerie P.S. You can read selections from the interview transcript here.
Is it just me, or is there something grimly hilarious about The Man Who Claimed To Have Abolished Boom-And-Bust describing our recent economic turmoil as a “one-off”? Yep, here’s Brown in today’s FT: “We are paying a one-off cost for globalisation.” More seriously, this is the technocratic side of Brown which Downing St will hope
If you were going to craft The Most Exciting Speech Ever, then there’s a good chance it wouldn’t contain the phrase “Post-Bureaucratic Age,” and wouldn’t be delivered at the Technology-Entertainment-Design conference. But – as James Crabtree points out in an great post over at Prospect – there are quite a few reasons to take David
Good spot by the FT’s Jim Pickard, who has picked up on these informal minutes from the last meeting of Labour’s National Executive Committee. He’s aleady rooted out some of the juiciest sections (including stuff about voting reform and the election date), so I’d suggest you head over to the FT Westminster blog for that.
Stay tuned for live coverage from 1200. 1200: And we’re off, bang on time. First question on Labour’s elderly care plans. Brown delivers a load of platitudes about how the government is committed to better care. Even adds that he hopes for cross-party backing. 1201: Cameron now. He leads on elderly care plans too –
Yesterday’s Guardian story about a potential death tax would have been perfect material for Cameron in PMQs. Even after Andy Burnham’s denials, there are still legitimate questions to be asked about it. For instance, would the government say that they will never propose the tax? And, if not, how will they pay for their social
A strident interview from David Cameron in today’s Express, in which he touches on everything from inheritance tax to not, never, ever joining the Euro. It’s this passage that jumped out at me, though: “Middle Britain has had a wretched time under Labour. This Government has taxed mortgages, marriages, pensions, petrol and travel and raised
The Tories are keen to hammer the government over the £20,000 “death tax” story which appeared in the Guardian this morning. And, to that end, they’ve produced the attack poster above. According to their press release, it will appear in 18 sites across London tonight. At first glance, it’s a strong image with an equally
…well, sorta. 5:25 into his interview with Mike Huckabee, our former PM gives his take on the constant stream of Iraq inquiries: You can certainly see his point. Although I doubt the government will be too impressed with Blair trawling through all the Iraq stuff on American television, only weeks before he hits the campaign
If you’re going to take anything away from Andy Burnham’s press conference this morning – apart from his denials about a £20,000 “death duty” – it’s how heavily those Labour “guarantees” are going to feature in the election campaign. Here we had social care guarantees, cancer treatment guarantees, waiting line guarantees, and even a new
With Brown pitching his AV referendum as the solution to at least some of our political ills, it’s worth highlighting the quieter efforts of another Labour MP, Derek Wyatt, to fix the system. Mr Wyatt, you see, has got involved with the MyMP iPhone app which helps voters track and converse with their MPs. The
