Gordon brown

Friday

David Blackburn

Darling in cloud cuckoo land

Labour can’t lay a finger on the Tories over national insurance. And desperation has morphed into hysteria. Alistair Darling has just told Sky News that David Cameron contradicted George Osborne and that the Tory plan is “unravelling”. “He is going to have to find deeper cuts, some experts are saying tens of thousands of jobs will go,” he said. “He’s had to go on to say that he’s going to have to cut which will mean job losses.” Now, Cameron said: “Even after our plans for public sector pay and pensions, benefits, ID cards – yes, it’s still not enough. I accept that.” But that does not contradict George Osborne,

Thursday

Martin Bright

Why Labour Needs To Be Much Fleeter of Foot

It is difficult to fault Cameron’s idea of a national volunteer force. While the Labour Party was forced to spend today defending the National Insurance hike, the Tories were able to seize the intiative with a genuinely far-sighted proposal. All the more galling for the government that this idea has been rattling around in Labour circles for at least a year. Cameron has stolen Labour’s clothes on this just as he did on co-operatives. David Lammy will be seething. His ideas for compulsory civic service were promoted in the pages of Prospect a year ago. He has been lobbying within the Labour Party for the policy for considerably longer. Unfortunately,

Daniel Korski

Win one for the Gipper

A Cameron government has the potential to change Britain – but not much else beside.  A Tory loss, however, could change much more. The Cameron Tories are a bellwether for Conservative movements in a number of countries, including the US. If they succeed, they will prove a powerful model for many moderate Republicans who believe their party is in an earlier post-Major phase – angry, divided and negative. If David Cameron fails to defeat Gordon Brown, few Republicans will look across to their British cousins for inspiration. The party will eschew any modernising project for a while longer and stick to their equivalent of IDS. In this scenario, the Republicans

Peter Hoskin

Your guide to Labour’s latest attack

So much for the positive vision.  Labour have spent most of the day attacking the Tories and their national insurance cut.  You’d have heard Brown trying to wheel out statistics about it during his Today Programme interview. And then the PM’s press conference, alongside Peter Mandelson and Alistair Darling, reduced to a How The Tories’ Sums Don’t Add Up session. One thing that’s striking about the latest attacks is how Labour are slipping, with calculated ease, between different figures to represent the efficiency savings that the Tories hope will fund their NI policy.  Here’s a quick guide to the numbers, so you know what’s what: £6 billion: This is roughly

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Woolas on the rack

Phil Woolas has just been confronted on Daily Politics about immigration figures which we uncovered on Coffee House yesterday, showing 99 percent of new jobs since 1997 are accounted for by immigration. His response is (unintentionally) hilarious. He is immigration minister, yet appears not to know what immigration figures mean. Here’s the transcript: Phil Woolas: I think that the Spectator’s analysis, perhaps not surprisingly, is confusing two completely separate things Andrew Neil: These are Office of National Statistics figures.which we checked this morning. Do you accept that there are 1.7 million new jobs for people of working age between 16 and 64, correct? PW: Yes AN: And according to the

David Blackburn

The strange case of Charlie Whelan’s Commons pass

Well, now we know. Charlie Whelan enjoys the liberty of Westminster at the invitation of the parliamentary Labour party. Guido points out that it’s highly unlikely Whelan isn’t officially connected to Labour’s campaign. Labour tried to keep all this quiet, attempting to avert an ‘affluence for influence’ story that might undermine Brown’s attempt to turn the election into a referendum on Lord Ashcroft. However, though this should prove bad news for Labour, these stories have little impact outside Westminster. Neither the Ashcroft scandal nor previous Whelan sagas moved the polls.      

Peter Hoskin

Labour firing blanks

Labour’s press conference this morning was a classic example of a party struggling to both have its cake and eat it.  Not only did we get Gordon Brown, as expected – but he was introduced, and joined, by Alistair Darling and Peter Mandelson.  Three heavy hitters to bash out one message: that the Tories’ national insurance plans are a “threat to the recovery”.  Or make that one-and-a-half messages, if you include the claim that the Tories couldn’t realistically expect to make the efficiency savings to fund their NI cut this year.  There is, claimed the Labour triumverate, a “black hole” where the Tories’ tax and spending proposals should be.  

Peter Hoskin

Brown comes under heavy fire on Today

Woah. I doubt Brown will endure many tougher twenty-minute spells during this election campaign than his interview with on the Today Programme this morning. You could practically hear the crunching of his teeth, as John Humphrys took him on over Labour’s economic record; practically smell the sweat and fear dripping down his brow. It was compulsive, and compelling, stuff. Humphrys started by putting a grim story to Brown: that his “handling of the economy was not prudent … your record suggests that the economy is not safe in your hands.”  The PM’s mission was to deny all this, and he did so with his usual stubborness and disingenuity.  His pitch

Wednesday

Martin Bright

What the Party Leaders Are Saying

I really enjoyed Anne McElvoy’s Standard column today. She is absolutely right to identify the false notes of day one of the election campaign. Gordon Brown really was talking nonsense about his ordinary middle-class background and David Cameron should certainly drop the glottal stop. She is right to say that neither has any clarity of vision yet. For what it’s worth I agree with Kevin Maguire agreeing me that Labour looked more confident on day one and that the Tories seemed nervous. On day two, Cameron was beginning to get into his stride and Brown’s interview with NIck Robinson was awful. The wall-to-wall media coverage is almost all completely absorbing,

Peter Hoskin

A heckle which might reverberate across the campaign

Mark the date: the first major heckle of the election campaign happened today, and Gordon Brown was the victim.  The perp was one Ben Butterworth, and he was angry at how his children can’t get into their choice of state school – a frustration which will be shared by thousands of parents across the country.  I wonder what they’ll think when they see that Brown ignored the man. The Tories will seize on this with considerable joy.  Their plans for widening school choice are – as the leader says in tomorrow’s magazine – the best reason for voting Conservative.  Mr Butterworth might just have made himself the poster boy for

Peter Hoskin

Is this how Brown hopes to defuse the Tories’ national insurance cut?

Well, the manifesto pledges sure are spilling out of Brown today.  After his proposals for cleaning up politics earlier, he’s now told Channel 4’s Gary Gibbon that Labour will pledge to keep the main rate of income tax at 20 pence in the forthcoming Parliament.  Whether that will satisfy those who would see their national insurance contributions rise over the same period, or placate those who were moved from a 10p tax rate to the 20p rate as a result of Brown’s politicking a few years ago, remains to be seen.  Here’s the video:

Peter Hoskin

A picture of innocence?

Gordon Brown’s visit to the Innocent smoothie HQ in London today is the subject of a great post from Paul Waugh, who reveals how close the PM came to a photo-opp nightmare.  But it also reminded me of this insight from Jonathan Freedland a few months ago, which I blogged at the time: “[The Labour campaign team have] taken a look at the branding of Innocent smoothies, hoping the authentic, unspun look might fit their own ‘unairbrushable’ product, G Brown.” I wonder whether Innocent picked up any branding tips from Brown earlier, in return…

Peter Hoskin

The context defeats Brown

So, mending our broken politics has been shoved to the forefront of the election campaign – at least for the time being. Brown has just given a speech on the issue, which – if you divorce it from all context – was actually fairly effective. Sure, things like reducing the voting age to 16, or a referendum on the alternative voting system, may not be your – or many people’s – cup of chai. But there were several proposals which, taken in isolation, will probably be as popular as they are sensible: banning MPs from working for lobbying comapanies, for instance. Or giving the voters the ability to recall MPs

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Straight out of the Brown textbook

What was probably Brown’s last PMQs performance as Prime Minister was classic Brown. He answered questions that hadn’t been asked, dodged ones that had, rattled off list after list of tractor production figures and mentioned Lord Ashcroft at every opportunity. But, as he has in recent months, he had some one liners to get off including the jab that Cameron ‘was the future once’, an echo of Cameron’s put down of Blair.   But that line couldn’t disguise the fact that Cameron got the better of Brown. Cameron’s speed on his feet just makes him better in this setting. His response to the heckle that the business leader he was

Peter Hoskin

PMQs live blog | 7 April 2010

Stay tuned for live coverage of PMQs. 1200: We’re about to start.  Brown is flanked by Harriet Harman and Jim Murphy.  Douglas Alexander, Alistair Darling and Alan Johnson are also on the front bench.  The heavy hitters are out in force… 1201: And here we go, for what could be Brown’s last ever PMQs as Prime Minister.  He starts, as usual, with condolences for fallen soldiers. 1202: The first question is as plantlike as they come: will Brown take £6 billion “out of the economy”?  Brown spins the usual dividing line about investing in frontline services, adding that the Tories would risk a “double dip” recession.  Hm. 1204: Massive cheer

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

British jobs for British workers…

Did you know that there are fewer British-born workers in the private sector than there were in 1997? I’d be surprised if so: these official figures are not released. The Spectator managed to get them, on request from the Office of National Statistics. We use the figures in tomorrow’s magazine, but I thought they deserves a little more prominence here. See the graph above, which shines a new light on the boasts Gordon Brown has been making. He said his Glasgow speech last month that: “If we had said twelve years ago there would be, even after a global recession, 2.5 million more jobs than in 1997 nobody would have

David Blackburn

Clegg blows a golden opportunity

Nick Clegg won’t get many opportunities to sell himself to voters and he has just been demolished on the Today programme. All things to all men, Clegg was all over the place. He couldn’t give an exact answer when questioned about the size of the deficit, and the Lib Dems’ shifting position on the depth of cuts was exposed once again, recalling his autumn wobble on ‘savage cuts’. He also refused to rule out a VAT rise. Similarly, he could not expand on his plans for parliamentary reform beyond labels such as ‘radicalism’, ‘renewal’ and ‘the old politics’. Caught between defending himself from the Tories and attacking Labour, Clegg panicked.

Tuesday

Peter Hoskin

Inauthenticity, meet skewer

We’re not even one day into the election campaign proper, and already the internet is fulfilling its role as the Exposer-in-Chief of spin, deceits and slip-ups aplenty.  I direct you towards Guido’s post on Brown’s – ahem – impromptu support at St Pancras station earlier.  Or Left Foot Forward’s account of the omissions from Cameron’s list of The Great Ignored.  Or Sam Coates’s tweets about the #stagemanagedelection.  And there’s plenty more where they came from. In a campaign where inauthenticity is going to get skewered at every turn, politicians clearly need to go about things differently.  But there are all too many signs that they’re stuck in the old, familiar

David Blackburn

A burnt out case

Freeing Manchester United from the Glazers is not what I envisaged when Ed Miliband promised ‘a radical manifesto’. But the Guardian reports that a fourth Labour government will legislate so that football fans can buy their beloved clubs. Clearly Brown’s granite is plastic to the touch. I’ll reserve judgement until the manifestos are published, but, as Alex notes, the feeling is that New Labour’s zeal is exhausted. Budget initiatives on stamp duty and the retirement age originated in Tory press releases and the Queen’s Speech regurgitated policies dating back to the 2007-08 sitting. I suspect the manifesto will offer the same gristle. We should be thankful for small mercies because

Daniel Korski

The Tunnel Ridge Fault election

At times the chasm between Britain’s political parties is as great as the San Andreas Fault. Sometimes the difference is more like a small rift, a matter of tone not policy. In this year’s election, the difference between the parties is somewhere in between, like the lesser-known Tunnel Ridge Fault in Eastern California. In part, the appearance of only minor differences may explain why the polls are showing such different things; some predict that Labour will hang on to power, others that the Tories will be able to win. But campaigning will bring out the differences between the parties – and the party leaders – into full view to an