Politics

Now that Johann Lamont has quit as leader of Scottish Labour, bookies are now taking odds on her successor. Four of the eight most likely candidates are Westminster MPs and third-favourite is Gordon Brown himself. He’s struggling to find a role nowadays, and there’s not much demand for him in the international speaker circuit. His role in the referendum campaign was seen, by some, as decisive. So is it now time for him to settle down to a new fiefdom? He has some support. Here is Michael Connarty, Labour MP for Linlithgow and East Falkirk, on BBC Radio Scotland this morning:- “People are talking about Gordon Brown as leader. I think he should lead us

It was the wee things that did it. Things like vision, inspiration, confidence and all the other details that coalesce into that strange something called leadership. There are many types of leader and leadership is another of those things easier to see than define but all successful leaders share one essential quality: they can choose a hill and persuade their followers that’s the place they must die. Johann Lamont never had a hill. By the end she didn’t have much of an army either. Scottish Labour is a party suffering from some kind of political dementia right now. It kind of remembers being a contender and it still stands before

Johann Lamont and Tony Blair don’t have much in common. But they are both causing Ed Miliband trouble this morning.   I suspect that those close to Miliband are relieved that Lamont has quit as the leader of the Scottish Labour party; his statement on her resignation last night was barely lukewarm. Certainly, the Miliband circle didn’t hold her in high regard and became despairing of her abilities during the referendum campaign. But what they won’t like is how she has taken a swing at them on the way out. She has lambasted Miliband’s office for treating Scottish Labour as ‘a branch office of a party based in London.’ These words will

So the EU wants Britain to pay a 1.7 billion surcharge for the heinous crime of having an economic recovering. How dare we object? Just think of all the good uses that money could be put to by the men in Brussels. After, all £1.7 billion could: 1) Serve the interest on Greece’s debt for 29 days 2) Serve the interest on Spain’s debt  for 19 days 3) Serve the interest on Italy’s debt for 7 days 4) Keep the £150 million per annum Eurocrat Express – the specially chartered train service for channelling officials back and forth between Brussels and Strasbourg – going for 11 years 5) Pay the £8.7 billion

Last week, the Tab, an online student tabloid, published an article by an anonymous Cambridge student entitled ‘I shouldn’t have been aggressively reminded of my abortion at Freshers Fair’. The author was complaining that she had been upset by a stand at the fair run by Cambridge Students For Life, an anti-abortion student society. The stall, she argues, had no place at an event that is meant to welcome new freshers, and was offensive to her personal choices. Her article certainly offended me. Her own abortion, she tells us, ‘crosses my mind only once in a blue moon, and never tinged with regret’. It is clear that she considers abortion

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_23_January_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Charlotte Leslie and James Forsyth join Sebastian Payne to discuss the NHS.” startat=1410] Listen [/audioplayer] As someone who believes that a Labour government would be a calamity for Britain, I ought not to mind the recent fuss about NHS Wales. Yes, it is a disaster – as the Daily Mail has been cleverly highlighting. And it has been run by Labour for 15 years, so they’re guilty as charged. Jeremy Hunt, the Health Secretary, makes this point powerfully today. But if the English NHS is much better by comparison to Wales, it’s not because of him, nor because of David Cameron. It’s because of Tony Blair. The NHS