Politics

Read about the latest UK political news, views and analysis.

Wednesday

Steerpike Steerpike

Jim Murphy’s popularity surges (in England)

There’s not much love for Labour in Scotland at the moment, with Mr S reporting this week that Jim Murphy has failed to mention his own party on campaign leaflets. As the SNP come out on top in the polls and the reds hope for a ‘late swing‘ to Labour north of the border, the Scottish Labour leader can take comfort that he is at least popular down south. Word reaches Mr S that at a London fundraiser last week for the Scottish Labour Party, a jog with fitness freak Jim was auctioned off for well over £1,000. Meanwhile a bottle of House of Commons whisky signed by Ed Miliband failed to reach £100 in bids,

The Spectator

Podcast special: competition is key as the airports debate comes in to land

The debate over the future of Britain’s airports will reach its conclusion in just four months. In this View from 22 podcast special, The Spectator’s Fraser Nelson discusses the current state of the debate and the likely outcomes of the Davies Commission with Stewart Wingate, CEO of Gatwick Airport; Simon Calder, Travel Editor of The Independent and Christian Wolmar, travel expert and a candidate for Labour’s London mayoral nomination. Which outcome do our experts think is the most likely? What are the benefits of creating more competition between each airport? And what role will airports play in the upcoming general election and next year’s London mayoral election? This podcast was sponsored by Gatwick Airport

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Should Labour dismiss a letter from 100 business chiefs?

The Labour reaction today to the Telegraph’s high-volume splash on 100 business leaders warning about the dangers of a Labour government has largely been along the lines of ‘how interesting, and tomorrow will you tell us about the Pope’s theology?’ The coverage of the letter, which has the mark of Tory co-chair Lord Feldman, has certainly created a rather stark contrast to the party’s own announcement that it will give workers on zero hours contracts a legal right to request proper hours after 12 weeks. Labour likes this contrast. The letter says: Dear Sirs, We run some of the leading businesses in the UK. We believe this Conservative-led Government has

Alex Massie Alex Massie

A shocking Scottish opinion poll reveals that Labour aren’t dead yet

When is a disaster also a miracle? When it allows Scottish Labour to simultaneously endure its worst result since 1931 and live to fight another day, that’s when. Yesterday’s ComRes/ITV poll is the best news Labour has enjoyed in months. That’s how grim it has been for Labour lately. A poll of voters in 40 Labour constituencies which puts them six points behind the SNP may not be much of a lifeline but it’s the only lifeline available to the erstwhile people’s party. It will have to do. Sure, this poll suggests the SNP could take as many as 28 Labour seats meaning that the nationalists would, probably, win something like

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Exclusive: Nick Clegg enlists Basil Fawlty to play Farage in TV debate rehearsals

Tomorrow’s TV debate between the seven party leaders is the chance for the insurgent parties to muscle up to the mainstream leaders, make them look tired and old, and in doing so gain more supporters. But the leader with the biggest challenge is Nick Clegg, the insurgent in the 2010 debates, now coming to the end of five years in government. How does he fight Farage and boost the Lib Dem brand? The Lib Dem leader has been rehearsing with colleagues playing his rivals like all the other politicians, but I understand that his preparations for the debate have a rather more stellar quality to them than his opponents’ rehearsals. John

Steerpike Steerpike

Spectator Life celebrates its third birthday

Mr S was a guest at Spectator Life‘s birthday party at Belgraves. To mark the magazine’s third anniversary, party-goers including Princess Michael of Kent, Pippa Middleton, Rachel Johnson and Mick Hucknall joined editor Olivia Cole to raise a glass in celebration. Gosford Park actress Camilla Rutherford stuck to water at the event, revealing to Steerpike that she is expecting her fourth child. Meanwhile over at the bar, Daily Politics‘s Jo Coburn reminisced about meeting her fellow guest Hucknall during her university days – something which the Simply Red singer struggled to remember. While none of the publicity shy Tories tipped for success in this issue’s cover feature David Cameron’s secret A-List could summon enough bravery to attend the bash, Nicky Haslam was

Tuesday

Sebastian Payne

New poll shows SNP will annihilate Labour — but the nation is still divided over independence

Scottish Labour is having no luck in denting the SNP’s support. ComRes/ITV News have released a new poll this evening, which shows a 19 per cent swing to the SNP across the 40 Labour held seats in Scotland. Based on this, the SNP would take 28 of these seats in the upcoming general election. North of the border, ComRes puts the SNP on 43 per cent, Labour on 37, the Tories on 13 and Ukip, the Lib Dems and Greens on two per cent each. The ComRes findings fall in line with the other polls taken in Scotland from Lord Ashcroft and ICM — the latter recently suggested that the SNP would take

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

The confusion of Ukip’s immigration policy

Immigration is a pretty important driver for voters who turn to Ukip. So you would have imagined that the party might have spent a while really making sure that its own policy on the matter is crystal clear. This morning in Dover, Nigel Farage said ‘I’m saying a net level of about 30,000 a year is roughly what we had for 50 years from 1950 almost until the turn of the century’. This seemed to be a bit of an about-turn from the Ukip leader’s decision earlier this month to ditch the 50,000 cap on the number of migrants arriving in the UK each year. Farage dropped the 50,000 target

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Westminster sneers at Joey Essex because it is a closed shop of know-it-alls

Well, at least Joey Essex has given bored pundits something to talk about today. He pitched up at a press conference with Nick Clegg, and took a selfie with the Deputy Prime Minister, which will certainly add to Clegg’s collection of useful props he hopes might win him a few more votes. The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones says this is an ‘image of the crisis in our political system’. Perhaps it does make Clegg appear rather desperate. But much of the tone has been sneering at a figure so apparently stupid as Essex wandering about in Westminster at all. I should declare an interest as I’m one of the journalists who

Steerpike Steerpike

Lord Ashcroft jets off into the sunset

So farewell then Lord Ashcroft: well, not quite. The former Tory Party treasurer has announced today that he has resigned his life peerage, yet will be able to keep his title for life, under changes to the rules passed in 2013. Having fallen out with Cameron in 2010, the billionaire one-time Tory backer and in-house pollster is said to have been severely put out that there was no job forthcoming after having kept the party afloat for the wilderness years. Since then, he has rebranded himself as an independent pollster, though there is still some bad blood with No 10. The row about Ashcroft’s non-domiciled tax status that blew up just before

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Can Natalie Bennett exceed expectations on Thursday night?

Few politicians can have gone into a debate with lower expectations than Natalie Bennett. After her ‘brain fade’ on LBC, the Green leader has been roundly written off. There have been murmurings that the decent thing for her to do would be to stand down in favour of Caroline Lucas, the party’s first MP and a far more accomplished media performer. But the one consolation for Bennett in all this is that it is very easy for her to beat expectations on Thursday night. She won’t have to do much to get the media to take a second look at her. If Bennett can unloose a zinger or two, she’ll

Sebastian Payne

Mini Election: what’s on the mind of Scottish nationalists?

The Scottish nationalists are in a buoyant mood. At last weekend’s spring conference in Glasgow, the 3,000-odd SNPers had two main issues for the upcoming general election: fighting both the Westminster establishment and the coalition’s austerity programme. In the latest Mini Election video, watch above, I spoke to some SNP supporters to find out what’s on their minds. When the conference opened on Saturday morning, the crowd were asked if they were new SNP members or first time attendees of an SNP conference. The majority of those represent in the hall raised their hands, showing just how much the party has grown since the referendum in September. Most of  Nats I spoke to

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Boffo Tory election strategy launched

You will remember how the Tories planned to deal with Ukip. Well, that was just the start. David Cameron’s interview with the Daily Mail today is all very well and good but it remains the case that the party’s approach to Scotland is very simple: THE SNP ARE DREADFUL. PLEASE VOTE FOR THEM. (Works best if delivered in the style of Kenneth Williams.)

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Cameron: Je ne regrette rien

David Cameron doesn’t regret the Lansley reforms that have done so much to damage any chance that the Tories could be trusted again by voters on the NHS. That’s what he told the Today programme this morning, saying: ‘The reforms were important and they were right… Of course [I stand by the changes]. If you’re saying to me: “Would you rather have 20,000 more bureaucrats and 9,000 fewer doctors?” Of course not.’ listen to ‘Today: David Cameron defends hostile campaign focus on Labour and Ed Miliband’ on audioBoom It’s difficult to find many Tories who privately share his view. Many who still think the spirit of the reforms were right

Steerpike Steerpike

Revealed: How Labour’s election broadcast star supported Arthur Scargill’s Socialist party

Tonight Martin Freeman will take on a starring role in the latest Labour election broadcast. In the short film, the Sherlock actor says that for him ‘there’s only once choice’ and that’s Labour. Alas for Labour, that hasn’t always strictly been the case. Mr S recalls the 2001 general election during which Freeman voted not for Labour, but instead for Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Labour party. At the time, Scargill’s party pledged to leave the EU, create a four-day working week, abolish the monarchy and axe the House of Lords if they took power. Then in 2005, Freeman said he would rather abstain from voting than vote for Tony Blair’s Labour in the general election: ‘I don’t know that

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Does David Cameron’s new jobs plan mean recruiting a million more immigrants?

The Conservatives have offered a rather peculiar new pledge: another two million jobs. They are right to focus on their record job creation, as I outlined in my Spectator cover story on the jobs miracle. But I also discussed, then, how there are already now massive worker shortages in certain parts of the country – and employers in places like Poole can’t get enough immigrants. In several parts of the country, we are already hitting what economists call ‘full employment’. Cameron’s target should not be x more workers, but unemployment reduction – or, ‘full employment’ in every part of the UK. You can do that by shortening dole queues. This, and only

Monday

Sebastian Payne

Two more polls suggest Ed Miliband’s ‘Paxo bounce’ is sliding away

Ed Miliband’s so-called ‘Paxo bounce’ in the opinion polls is ebbing away. The polls out this evening have the Conservatives either level pegging with Labour or slightly ahead. Tonight’s latest from YouGov/The Sun has both parties neck and neck, with the Conservatives and Labour on 35 per cent — a three point rise for the Tories on Sunday — while Ukip is on 12 per cent, the Lib Dems on eight and the Greens on five. In his weekly national poll, Lord Ashcroft has the Tories two points ahead on 36 per cent, up three points from last week. The Tory pollster has Labour on 34 per cent, Ukip on ten, the Lib Dems

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Ten points from David Cameron’s Daily Mail interview

David Cameron has given an interview to the Daily Mail where he appears to confirm that he will extend Right-to-Buy to 2.5m housing association tenants – a plan first revealed by James Forsyth. Here are the main points of the interview:- 1. Cameron says he’ll extend Right-to-Buy, blames Lib Dems for resisting him thus far. ‘I am a massive supporter of the right-to-buy. I have sweated blood in this government to get the Liberal Democrats, who don’t really buy this and believe in it, to agree to bigger discounts, to market the right-to-buy to stop councils hiding it away from their tenants. We’ve got more people who’ve bought their council homes. We’ve got

Harry Cole

Nick Clegg’s women problem

Nick Clegg ain’t done yet, and as if to prove how deadly serious he is about winning this election, the Deputy Prime Minister visited a hedgehog sanctuary on his first campaign stop. Probably his least prickly public encounter since 2010. The Liberal Democrats have focussed their initial onslaught focusing on women, with Monday’s Guardian reporting that it was ‘his mission to win over female voters in a number of his party’s target constituencies’: ‘Party strategists believe that winning over the female vote will be crucial to their chances of success across a range of key battleground constituencies.’ All of which is a little embarrassing when you consider just how poor

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

‘There’s no such thing as a safe seat’: Douglas Carswell explains his absence from Ukip launch

Ukip launched its general election campaign poster today. Nigel Farage was there, both in person and in print, with a very large image of his face emblazoned across the new poster. Mark Reckless was there, posing for photos with the party’s ‘pledge card’ (although unless he has very big pockets or an enormous wallet, the one pictured is probably a poster for people’s windows rather than the real pledge card). And here is our pledge card pic.twitter.com/9o5ArIW5Um — Mark Reckless (@MarkReckless) March 30, 2015 But Reckless isn’t the party’s only MP, is he? Where was Douglas Carswell? Carswell was back in his constituency campaigning today, and received a barrage of