Politics

David Cameron’s new Inheritance tax policy is clearly an important political message of aspiration and family values rather than a policy that will either help many or actually have much fiscal impact. The OBR has numbers on death rates and estates subject to the tax: just under 600,000 people died in 2013/14 and only 5 per cent of those had estates that were liable to inheritance tax. So that is just over 26,000 deaths in one year whose estates paid inheritance tax. According to the Telegraph, Cameron’s policy would only begin in 2017, two years into the next parliament. So three years of this policy and on 2013/14 rates this

Even Tory insiders admit that while they broadly had the better of the first week of the campaign, Labour had the better of the week just gone.  This makes it imperative for their hopes of re-election that the Tories wrest back the initiative this week. As I say in the Mail on Sunday, if they don’t, Tory discipline—which is already beginning to fray a bit—will crack, and Ed Miliband will have the keys to Number 10 within his grasp. The Tories have made a decent start to this task. Labour has been unsure of how to respond to the Tories’ commitment to give £8 billion more to the NHS. While

My most recent constituency polling has found an increase in support for Labour and the Conservatives (and, in their own battlegrounds, the Liberal Democrats) while the UKIP share has drifted down since last year. Even so, neither of the main parties has established a clear overall lead, either in national polling or in the marginals. So while the evidence is that voters may be focusing more on the parties capable of forming a government, they are not finding the choice becoming any easier – or more palatable. [datawrapper chart=”http://cf.datawrapper.de/PgOJF/3/”] The latest large-scale national polling I have conducted on the impact of the campaign helps explain why. Over the last month,

Is Labour’s war on the media finally over? After Mr S reported this week that journalists were jeered for asking questions at a Tony Blair event, relations between the party and the media appear to have warmed. As Ed Miliband and Ed Balls head north of the border to campaign with Jim Murphy, it fell to the Scottish leader to make peace with hacks. Opening up their press conference in Edinburgh to journalists’ questions, Murphy declared they would let some ‘people’ ask questions too, once the pesky media had been dealt with: ‘It’s only journalists with their hand up at the moment, but they’re people too.’ A notable warming in relations, Mr S thanks

With every policy launch during an election campaign, it is worth asking why a party has chosen that policy and why it is launching it on that particular day. This is generally because answering those questions helps you work out what message a party is trying to send and whether they are on the defensive or offensive. But today it is worth asking this question simply because it would be nice to get an answer: why have the Tories launched two completely unconnected policies which don’t sound very Toryish on the same day? One of these policies is the freezing of rail fares, which begs the question, why did the Tories expend so

When journalists have the much sought after opportunity to interview the heads of states and organisations with appalling human rights records the very least we expect is to see such people given a thorough cross-examining. What we don’t expect is for heads of terrorist organisations to be provided with a platform from which to give the equivalent of a party political broadcast and to get away with it virtually unchallenged.  And yet that is precisely what we got when the BBC’s Middle East correspondent Jeremy Bowen recently interviewed Khaled Meshaal, the head of Hamas. Hamas leader Meshaal warns of Israeli ‘extremism’ after elections, reads the baffling headline that accompanies Bowen’s