Read about the latest UK political news, views and analysis.
‘It was an utter humiliation’, says Bercow’s biographer, after the Speaker was openly mocked by MPs as he retreated in the row over who will be the new Commons clerk. listen to ‘John Bercow: ‘Modest pause’ in Commons clerk recruitment’ on Audioboo
It’s open warfare at the Times between two leading lights on the right – the newspaper’s former Comment Editor Tim Montgomerie and longtime columnist Matthew Parris, who held no punches in his Saturday column in the paper: ‘My fellow columnist Tim Montgomerie could not have been more wrong when he wrote in yesterday’s Times Red Box blog that “Ukip voters don’t believe that the Tory leader is serious about the referendum”. The “let’s-get-out-now” brigade in British politics have a very different fear. They fear that Mr Cameron would indeed hold his referendum and win it.’ Montgomerie took to Twitter the same day to dismiss Parris as backward looking – and he pushed
The talks between the Lib Dems and the Conservatives on the anti-terror measures that David Cameron will unveil this afternoon have finally finished. There are a few more details to be thrashed out – crossing of Ts and dotting of Is rather than major policy decisions – but the two parties are basically there. That the talks have only broken up with just over an hour to go until the statement shows how contentious these measures have been in the Coalition. David Cameron’s press conference, in which he set out the heightened threat, was partly a softening-up exercise to push the Lib Dems into accepting what the security and intelligence
This article first appeared on Apollo Magazine’s website. The Scottish independence referendum takes place on 18 September. What would a ‘Yes’ vote mean for the country’s museums and galleries? Would it lead to a loss of funding streams? And if it did, would an independent Scottish government be prepared to increase its investment? YES: James Holloway There’s one thing I’ve never heard in more than 40 years in the arts in Scotland, and that is ‘money is no problem’. It has always been a problem, often the only problem. There’s no lack of ambition or inspiration, but money has always been hard to come by. And it could be a great
What should worry David Cameron more, Douglas Carswell’s defection to Ukip or reports that as many as 100 Tory MPs could go into the general election pledging to leave the European Union? The former is certainly more dramatic and promises plenty of humiliation over the next few months. But the latter could show the Prime Minister that he doesn’t have as much time on European reform as he would like, and that he is still not trusted by a large contingent of his party. It is one thing for Better Off Out members such as Mark Reckless to pledge to campaign to leave, no matter what reforms David Cameron manages
The Coalition parties are gearing up for a week of minding the gaps. Tomorrow, David Cameron plans to tell MPs about measures that he feels are necessary for plugging the gaps in Britain’s armoury. They’re gaps highlighted to him by the intelligence and security services, and where the Tories once said they would be very sceptical about gaps, whether they existed, and whether it was right to plug them, the Prime Minister seems pretty keen to listen to the spooks. But the Lib Dems are still cross about the gaps, and possibly cross about another change of heart from the Conservatives. That’s why Sir Menzies Campbell told the World this
Where is this burning point of principle that drove Douglas Carswell into the arms of Ukip? I’ve read lots about his defection, and I’m still none the wiser. We’re told that he was talking to Farage for almost a year, which would have overlapped with the time he told me that the Tories need to unite behind Cameron because he was the only one promising an in-out referendum. What has changed? Carswell says that Cameron is not serious about Europe. The Prime Minister has become the only leader in the continent to promise an in-out referendum. I’m not sure how much more serious one can be. Should he lay out,
David Cameron and the Tories’ electoral hopes are about to take a long walk on Clacton’s short pier. A poll in the Mail on Sunday today has Ukip on 64% and the Tories on 20%, a lead that suggests this contest is over before the writ has even been moved. So, Ukip are going to get their first MP. This means that the fracture on the right of British politics is a lot closer to becoming permanent, handing Labour the kind of inherent electoral advantage that the Tories enjoyed in the 1980s. This morning, the next election is Ed Miliband’s to lose. One of the striking things about the poll
Donald Tusk, the Polish Prime Minister, has been appointed the new European Council President. Tonight, Tusk has had warm words about how imperative it is that Britain’s concerns about the EU are addressed. As Open Europe reports, he called the possibility of an EU without Britain a “black scenario.” Tusk’s appointment is a mixed blessing for David Cameron. On the one hand, Tusk comes from a non-Eurozone country meaning that he’ll be sympathetic to Britain’s desire for single market protections for the Eurozone outs. The Ukraine crisis has also reminded the Poles of how important Britain is in terms of stiffening the EU approach towards Russia; meaning that Tusk
I rejoiced at the news of Douglas Carswell’s defection to Ukip. Not because I’m a Ukip supporter (I haven’t made up my mind) but because it highlights the slippery dishonesty of the Tories’ modernisation programme – ‘the political equivalent of botox’, as Charles Moore puts it in today’s Telegraph: The pattern of the leader’s actions conveys a message to party workers: they are the problem. Not surprisingly, they tend to leave. Instead of being a renewal, modernisation has become a hollowing out. Douglas Carswell, by contrast, is authentically a moderniser. At the heart of Carswell’s vision for Britain lies the expansion of the franchise and political accountability. He believes that digital technology can create social cohesion and
I have had to suspend my ‘No Thanks’ independence referendum tour of Scotland. It was back in June that I announced my plan to tour the country. A hundred events. All outdoors in Scotland’s summer. Me, my makeshift stage of two upturned Irn-bru crates, a microphone, one of those small speaker-amps, a one or two-strong road crew, take it to the streets. ‘From Barrhead to Barra’ was my catchline. Barrhead is in my constituency and is synonymous with an industrial Scotland, a half hour’s drive from Glasgow. Barra is another Scotland, twelve hundred largely Gaelic-speaking fishers and crofters at the southern end of the Western Isles archipelago. The tour is old
Monday will be a busy day in the Commons. Speaker Bercow is expected to give a statement on the swelling row over his plan to appoint Carol Mills as Clerk of the House (or another mysterious new role that he’s considering concocting in an attempt to calm the feud with backbenchers). That feud is getting more and more vocal, so Bercow had better have something decent to tell MPs when he does speak. The early day motion tabled by Jesse Norman and Natascha Engel will only appear on the order paper on Monday, but the campaign has 84 supporters now (not all will sign the motion as some avoid EDMs
It was not so much the announcements that David Cameron made in his press conference about the terror threat to the UK that were significant, but what he looks like he’s going to have to announce on Monday. The Prime Minister confirmed that the threat level to the UK has been raised from ‘substantial’ to ‘severe’. But he also said that on Monday he will be unveiling new measures to address ‘gaps’ in the UK’s ‘armoury’: ‘I said very clearly last week that there would be no knee-jerk reactions. We will respond calmly and with purpose. And we’ll do so driven by the evidence and the importance of maintaining the
Mr S could not help think that last night’s Scottish CBI dinner looked a little dreary and frankly a bit ‘budget’. The PM was coming to town; could they not have strung up some bunting at the very least? There was good reason the whole thing looked rubbish though: bureaucracy. The guest list was cut from 700 to 230 and the budget for the event slashed to just £10,000 after the Electoral Commission declared that this was a pro-union campaign event. The penpushers decreed: ‘We are of the view that the CBI’s dinner does constitute campaigning and as a result we have sought detailed assurances from them and their suppliers
Stuart Wheeler has just been boasting on Sky News that two more Conservative MPs are ‘seriously considering’ defecting to Ukip. Wheeler has been the broker in any potential defections, wining and dining potential converts before asking if they want a meeting with Nigel Farage. Not all of them have said yes to that second offer. It is, though, plausible that there are MPs who are still not rock solid in their decision to back the Tories all the way to the next election. The result of the Clacton by-election, how David Cameron plays the Europe question and how he manages the party over the next few months will determine whether
What will be the impact on the Conservative party of Douglas Carswell’s defection? Even though there is some excitement this morning about other meetings that Ukip has held with Conservative MPs, it is worth pointing out that those meetings were firstly held a while ago, and secondly that a number of those MPs who did meet Stuart Wheeler decided not to meet Nigel Farage because that would have been a betrayal in itself of their party. Some did meet Farage, but decided not to make the leap. Carswell was one of those MPs who initially did not make that leap, so it is unwise to say that there will be
Anyone who would rather not live in a Britain run by Ed Miliband and Ed Balls should be dismayed at Carswell’s defection to Ukip. He is an original, intelligent and eloquent MP who has done much to help the Prime Minister form the more radical parts of his agenda. For a while, I thought that this was his game plan: to avoid frontbench positions, and engage constructive opposition – which is democratic tugging of the party leader from the vantage point of the backbenches. I defended him against critics who said he was an attention-seeker whose ego would one day explode. Today, it’s harder to defend him. He was elected to a
Douglas Carswell’s defection to Ukip is a serious blow to the Tory party. Unlike so many other defectors, Carswell is not off because he has an axe to grind. This isn’t about his personal prospects but policy. What makes this defection all the more potent is that Carswell has been a major influence on contemporary Toryism. His Direct Democracy agenda is one of the more sizable parts of the whole Tory modernisation project and his Euroscepticism isn’t driven by some Pathé news view of Britain but by a view of how this country can succeed as a modern, free-trading nation. Indeed, the section in Carswell’s speech celebrating contemporary Britain is
Douglas Carswell’s defection today to Ukip is terrible for David Cameron. But it is also deeply inconvenient for his band of eurosceptic brothers. He was a key member of a powerful ‘cell’ of MPs who met regularly to discuss strategies for pushing the Conservative leadership further on European policy. One key colleague in this cell tells me that its members are as shocked as anyone else by the defection because ‘Douglas was refusing to get involved in our shenanigans. It was difficult to get him to sign off on anything we wanted to do, he was incredibly loyal, so something serious must have happened over the summer to change his
As well as saying his decision is regrettable and counterproductive, the other Tory response to this morning’s shock defection by Douglas Carswell is to point people to instances where Carswell has said that only David Cameron as Prime Minister in 2017 will guarantee a referendum. In April, he wrote on his Telegraph blog: ‘In order to exit the EU, we need David Cameron to be Prime Minister in 2017 – the year when we will get the In/Out referendum, our chance to vote to leave the EU.’ Suggesting he is inconsistent is at least a little more nuanced than smearing him as a ‘headbanger’. But what Carswell’s defection today
