Politics

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

Monday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Pollsters could have got it wrong on the Scottish independence referendum

As the political nation waits with bated breath for the Scottish referendum result, the polls are dictating the mood. One showing Yes in the lead led to the abandonment of PMQs and all three party leaders heading to Scotland. Recent ones showing No back in the lead, have steadied nerves and reassured the No camp that they have halted Alex Salmond’s momentum and begun to turn the tide. But there are several reasons why the polls might not be as reliable a guide as usual in this referendum. First, as Mike Smithson notes, there hasn’t been a Scottish independence referendum before so. This means that the pollsters don’t have a

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Like it or not, Isis are Muslims. Calling them ‘monsters’ lets us off the hook

There are various pieties that politicians observe in the wake of some barbarity committed by Islamic fundamentalists and duly David Cameron observed them in his statement yesterday about the murder of David Haines. Of the perpetrators, he observed: ‘They are killing and slaughtering thousands of people – Christians, Muslims, minorities across Iraq and Syria. They boast of their brutality. They claim to do this in the name of Islam. That is nonsense. Islam is a religion of peace. They are not Muslims, they are monsters.’ I really wish he wouldn’t. It doesn’t add anything whatever to our understanding of Isis to say that they are not Muslims but monsters. They

Sunday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Shock election in Sweden as the Sweden Democrats become no3 party

Yes, Britain is on the point of breaking up – but there are more ill winds blowing in Europe right now. The National Front is polling so strongly in France that Marine Le Pen would be president if an election was held tomorrow. And as I write, the populist Sweden Democrats seem to be the only real winners of the general election held there today. As far as I can tell, this hasn’t been picked up by the English-language media yet – they’re focusing on the power transfer to the Social Democrats (this isn’t the same as a victory: a victory means you actually win more voters). What follows is from the Swedish

The Spectator

Please stay to build a better Britain: more Spectator readers write to Scots

This week’s Spectator cover piece is written by our readers. Here are some more letters to Scottish voters, explaining why our United Kingdom should stay together. I come from the Isles of Scilly, which is as far away from Scotland as it’s possible to get whilst remaining in the UK. Flung out into the Atlantic ocean, 28 miles off Land’s End, I have always thought of my islands as part of the great Celtic fringe of this Kingdom. All I can do is plead with the people of Scotland to look beyond an opportunity to ‘shake off Tory rule’ and to consider instead how fortunate it is to be born

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Boris in Metroland

Gaily into Uxbridge Station runs the red electric train, And alighting on the platform – he with the albino mane. Can he charm the blue-rinsed matrons, Past-it bankers, golf club patrons, Can he do it – yes he can!   Well done Boris! Side-step Clacton, ‘Essex is no place for me, ‘Better here in leafy Ruislip, with its vast majority. ‘Better here to fight the battle, ‘In Downing Street they’ll feel the rattle! ‘Uxbridge, baby – I’m your man!’  

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The case for Britain is being made in Scotland, now it must be made in England too

At times in the last few months, it has seemed that if no one was making the case for Britain in Scotland. Too often it seemed that Better Together knew the price of separation but not the value of Britishness. But that is changing. Yes closing the gap, and taking the lead in a couple of polls, has prompting an outpouring of emotion about the United Kingdom from those on the No side. At a pro-Union event in Edinburgh on Friday night, I was struck by how speakers from Gordon Brown to Danny Alexander to George Galloway all talked about Britishness in raw, emotional terms. This focus on Britishness is

Saturday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Latest indyref polls give mixed message

Who will be relieved and reassured when they read this weekend’s polls on how Thursday’s independence referendum will go? Well, it looks like neither camp has much to celebrate as the polls are all over the place – which means that anything could happen in just a few days’ time. So here’s what we know so far. Opinium has ‘No’ with a six point lead at 53 per cent, with ‘Yes’ on 47 per cent. Meanwhile an ICM poll for the Sunday Telegraph puts ‘Yes’ eight points ahead. A Panelbase poll comes out later tonight. It’s also worth noting this post from John Curtice, which says the ICM finding ‘while

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Boris selected: what’s next for the Tory leadership hopeful?

Unsurprisingly, Uxbridge and South Ruislip Conservatives picked Boris Johnson last night as their parliamentary candidate for the 2015 election. Boris has a 11,216 majority to defend, but that’s only the start of the work he needs to do. His supporters are well aware that before the Mayor can ever throw his hat into that leadership ring that they’re all looking forward to, he needs to build better links in the Parliamentary Conservative party beyond those who already think he is wonderful. He needs to reach out, for instance, to those MPs who have been brought into the George Osborne camp by the Chancellor’s clever system of patronage and promotion. Boris

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Who will revive Scottish Labour?

George Galloway announced his support for Gordon Brown as First Minister of Scotland last night. Galloway’s endorsement came as Brown turned up at an event at Usher Hall in Edinburgh that Galloway was compering. The endorsement was met with a broad grin by Brown. But behind the humour, there is a serious point, Scottish Labour knows that it has given Salmond and the SNP far too easy a ride at Holyrood. As the former Labour Minister Brian Wilson acknowledged at last night’s event, this referendum is happening because the SNP managed to win a majority in the Scottish Parliament and Labour must take some of the blame for that. That

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Deutsche Bank: Scottish independence would bring austerity on a scale never seen before

Many voters in Scotland moan about the media: half of the country wants separation, according to the polls, but almost all newspapers are against it. So where to turn, for dispassionate analysis? As James Forsyth says in his brilliant political column this week, there’s no one left to tell the truth. That’s why private advice, issued by financial analysts to their clients, is interesting: these guys have no interest in spin, only accuracy. If they issue duff advice, their career is over. The analysis of Deutsche Bank (pdf) has been flying around Twitter, but not many are inclined to read long PDFs. So the below is an edited extract. It’s from David Folkerts-Landau, its chief

Friday

Ed West Ed West

Being right-wing hasn’t made me happy

Can being more Right-wing make you happier? According to the right-wing Daily Mail it can: ‘People with conservative views are more content than their more liberal-minded neighbours, research suggests. ‘Those with politics that lean to the Right were found to have higher levels of well-being – even when their favoured political party was in opposition. ‘They benefit from the belief that problems are a person’s own making – which helps them deal better with whatever life throws at them.’ I can’t say it has exactly worked for me, but being an evolutionary conservative I tend to think that our internal political compass has a lot to do with simple biology,

Steerpike Steerpike

Former Newsnight hack slams Beeb’s referendum ‘propaganda’

Former Newsnight correspondent Paul Mason seems rather happy to be free of Auntie, especially since the Scottish independence referendum campaign sent the establishment to panic stations: ‘Not since Iraq have I seen BBC News working at propaganda strength like this. So glad I’m out of there,’ he writes on his Facebook page, to the consternation of former colleagues. ‘It’s on my friends-only Facebook page so not meant as any great statement other than weariness,’ Mason tells Mr S, ‘it says what it says.’ Lucky, then that he is now at Channel Four News – that famed bastion of slant free news.

Liam Fox

Watch: Liam Fox on why Scotland should remain in the Union

Talking to Scottish voters over the last couple of weeks, a number of points have been made with increasing regularity. The first is that the ‘yes’ campaign has had all the emotional appeal, while the Better Together campaign has focused on practical concerns, largely about money. The second is that there has been too much concentration on why the Union is better with Scotland in it, rather than focusing on why Scotland is better in the Union – the main concern of Scottish voters. Third, it has been surprising to discover the number of voters who believe that if there is a yes vote and things go wrong, it will be possible

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Jim Sillars’ threat of a ‘day of reckoning’ exposes the darker side of nationalism

Only yesterday, Jim Sillars was being paraded by Alex Salmond as a nationalist heavyweight who has been taken back into the fold. He had once fallen out with the Alex Salmond but the two were, apparently, good friends again. A photoshoot, above, consummated this reconcilliation. Sillars is a former SNP deputy leader but now not part of the apparatus-  so he can speak freely. All too freely, as it turns out. Here’s what he has said today. “This referendum is about power, and when we get a Yes majority, we will use that power for a day of reckoning with BP and the banks. The heads of these companies are rich men,

Roy Kerridge

Ian Paisley’s private kingdom

This is an extract from the The Spectator, 13 August 1982: One summer’s evening, I went for a stroll by the shores of Lough Erne, just outside the city of Enniskillen, Northern Ireland. Swifts and swallows patrolled separate strands of midge-covered waters as if divided into Catholics and Protestants. Gleaming in the twilight, the Gospel Tent stood in a field beside a full car park. A small poster on a telegraph pole proclaimed a ‘Fundamentalist Convention. Preacher: Dr Ian Paisley’. The event was scarcely publicised, and few people in Enniskillen knew that Paisley was on their doorstep. Now at last I had the chance to hear the man whom Dervla

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

How Scotland’s ‘yes’ side mastered the art of mob politics

While distributing free Spectators in Glasgow yesterday, I came across a Labour rally and ended up standing about two metres away from Ed Miliband as he gave his speech. But no one could hear a word he said because the ‘yes’ crowd were eyeballing him, chanting and looking as if they were about to eat him. Compare this to the serenity with which Alex Salmond makes all of his speeches: where are the ‘no’ heavies shouting him down? They don’t exist: you may get the odd heckler, but the tactics deployed by the two sides are fundamentally different. This underscores an important point, a trademark of this campaign: how the ‘yes’

Chloe Smith

We can win Generation Y over to politics – and the Conservatives

There are more people who have not yet voted for the Conservative Party than could ever leave it for Ukip. My party needs to remember: all voters matter, not just those Tories being wooed by Nigel Farage. The real prize is not stopping voters defecting to Ukip – it is making the Conservative Party the natural home for the next generation. In Britain today we have a dwindling generation of older people who use their vote, and a growing camp of younger people who don’t. Does that mean we shouldn’t bother with the young? Absolutely not. It would be wrong to ignore this phenomenon. Politicians need to meet it head on, and quickly. Most of today’s 18-24 year

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The young (and the English) have restored Scotland’s ‘no’ lead

No unionist should breathe easily after last night’s YouGov poll putting the ‘no’ team on a six-point lead. The race remains too close to call. And the poll also suggests a degree of volatility quite unlike that seen in general elections. Michael Sauders from Citi has dug deeper into the figures (pdf). You need to treat all Scottish polls with caution, due to the sample size and the fact that the turnout may be high enough to include people who polling companies don’t know exist. But YouGov found that the under-25s (the ones more likely to vote on the day, rather than by post) have switched form a 20-point lead for ‘yes’

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

How the ‘No’ camp should react to its regained poll lead

Anyone who thinks that the latest YouGov poll on Scottish independence, which shows the ‘No’ camp with a six-point lead over ‘Yes’ at 52 per cent to 48 per cent (once don’t-knows are excluded) is getting a little ahead of themselves. It is significant that this is the same pollster who sent Westminster into panic on Sunday with its poll putting ‘Yes’ in the lead. But the only effect this poll should have on the ‘No’ campaign in the final days is to stop a blind, useless sort of panic where bad decisions are made and colleagues brief against one another before the final result. The last-minute panic that the

Thursday

Peter Jones

The Boris Island of ancient Athens

During his lecture on Athens at the Legatum Institute (see p. 22), Boris Johnson placed great emphasis on Athens’ development of Piraeus harbour in the 5th century BC. Did he have an analogy with a pet project in mind? It was the statesman Themistocles who ‘had been the first to propose that the Athenians should take to the sea’, and in 493 BC began to turn Piraeus with its three harbours into a military facility, replacing the old harbour at Phalerum. With Persian attack from the sea in mind, he built dockyards, mooring sheds and fortifications. This move had momentous political consequences for the poor. In 508 BC, Cleisthenes’ democratic