Liberal democrats

The Tory conference was so forgettable that it’s hard now to remember it took place earlier in the week. But, for what it’s worth, here are my conclusions from the whole conference season: 1. The search for Osborne’s growth strategy has been called off. This ‘leadership’ theme was short for ‘leadership in the crisis, which we’ve now decided is inevitable’. Printing £75 billion will be  prelude to printing £400 billion, the inflation tax is back. Osborne perhaps thinks this new magic gold will bring economic recovery. So did the Emperor in Faust, when the devil suggested that printing money would avert fiscal crisis. This scheme ended in tears in Goethe’s

The Ken Clarke and Theresa May cat-flap has sparked up again this morning, with the Justice Secretary accusing the Home Secretary of using “laughable child-like examples” to attack the Human Right Act. In some ways, it’s hard to take a political row about a cat particularly seriously. But this back and forth between May and Clarke is actually exposing something very important: the Liberal Democrats are not the only brake on Tory radicalism. At the moment, lots of Tory ministers – up to and including the Prime Minister – like to imply that they’d be doing far more on Europe, immigration and the Human Rights Act if it wasn’t for

Today’s papers resound with the news that Theresa May is resisting Liberal Democrat opposition to close the loophole over the “right to family life”, Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. This change, it is argued, will ensure that foreign criminals are deported so that the courts protect, as David Cameron put it, “the United Kingdom”.  The announcement is a carefully choreographed step to differentiate the Tories from the Liberal Democrats. Dr Evan Harris, the self-anointed king of the Lib Dems in exile, told the BBC this morning: ‘It’s actually a useful tool because it enables Nick Clegg to say the Human Rights Act (HRA) is here to say

It’s safe to say that Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg don’t get on. Even before he was elected leader, Miliband told the New Statesman he would never work with the Lib Dem leader: “Given what he is supporting, I think it is pretty hard to go into coalition with him.” He refused to share a platform with Clegg in the AV campaign, and then attacked him in Newcastle with a list of promises he accused the Lib Dems of breaking. All along, the plan has been to turn those who voted Lib Dem in 2010 against Clegg and lure them over to Labour. Whether it’s working is hard to tell.

The main event at the Labour conference this morning has been a long debate on Britain’s place in the world, featuring Douglas Alexander, Harriet Harman and Jim Murphy – shadow foreign secretary, shadow DfID secretary and shadow defence secretary respectively. The debate touched on liberal intervention, soft power and human rights; there was even a video message from Aung San Suu Kyi. But Murphy’s extended homily on the military covenant was the centre piece of the discussion. Murphy revealed a plan to allow servicemen to join the Labour party for just £1 and he also pledged to defend the pensions of retired servicemen and their widows from cuts, saying that reducing payments was

Global events may soon relegate Labour conference to the News in Brief sections of newspapers, especially as it appears that G20 finance ministers are preparing for Greece to default and for contagion to spread to other parts of the Eurozone. So, the Labour leader has wasted no time as Labour conference opens. In interviews with the Observer and the Sunday Mirror, he revives his tactic of presenting himself as an insurgent, the man to “rip up the rulebook”. He makes a pledge or two: the headline grabbing idea is a cap tuition fees at £6,000 per year, paid for by reversing a planned corporation tax cut on the hated banks. This blatant

As the Liberal Democrat leadership leaves Birmingham, it is a contented bunch. Their conference has gone as well as could be expected. There were no embarrassing defeats for the leadership and no gaffes by any of their ministers. But conference was yet another reminder of how much of a gap there is between where those around Clegg want to take the party and where the activist base wants to go. When I asked one of Clegg’s allies about this discrepancy, he told me that the important thing to remember was that the membership, who elect the leader, take a different view from the activists. As evidence of this, he cited

I’ve been away from Birmingham today but, even from a distance, it’s clear that Tim Farron has had a rather difficult day. It started with a story in The Times this morning about upset among his fellow MPs about his rhetoric on Sunday implying that the coalition partners would get divorced before 2015 and continued with him getting in a bit of a tangle about his leadership ambitions in interviews with Andrew Neil and Gary Gibbon. Farron’s problem is that he is an obvious candidate to run in any future leadership contest and so the leadership will constantly push him about his intentions. These are hard enough questions for any