Uk politics

Wednesday

Peter Hoskin

The Budget will be on 24 March

So now we know.  Gordon Brown has just announced that the Budget will be on 24 March – which strongly implies an election date of 6 May.  Brown could dissolve Parliament on 6 April, the manifestos would be published on 12 April, and then we’d be into the campaign proper.  Which means even more speeches, polls and dread speculation than we’re getting now. As for the Budget’s general flavour, we’ll probably get an idea of that today, too.  Brown’s currently giving a speech in which he’s brushing over recent tremors in the markets, to say that we are “weathering the storm; now is no time to turn back”.  Which comes

Tuesday

Fraser Nelson

Tough on dangerous dogs, blind to the causes of dangerous dogs

It’s ‘dangerous dogs’ season again – but is there more to the story? The Today programme gave this its main 8.10am slot. The BBC sought to interview some chavs to sneer at – the listener being invited to conclude that the law must be brought to bear on them. But Brendan O’Neill was quite right in this week’s magazine, where he describes how government seeks to use this scare for yet another power grab over the citizens. The aim, he says “is not only to bring dog-owners into that very big tent of People Continually Spied On By The Authorities, but to weed out the ‘devil dogs that terrorise socially

David Blackburn

The prospect of another EU treaty is a huge problem for reformer Brown

It seems there must be discussion about a potential European Monetary Fund, and an organisation to manage Europe’s economies that circumvents Maastricht, to avert future fiscal crises. So much for Lisbon, the treaty to end all treaties. Quite why no one, especially the treaty’s opponents, acknowledged the possibility of a member state’s financial collapse whilst Lisbon was being ratified during the recession is a mystery. However, all that is past. The question for the future is will there be a referendum this time round? Adrian Michaels, rightly, point out that the Tories’ eurowars are likely to be renewed at the most inopportune time for Cameron. But Cameron will offer a

Peter Hoskin

Vaizey drops Cameron in it (again)

Michael Wolff’s portrait of David Cameron in the latest issue of Vanity Fair is well worth reading, even it it’s a weird kind of a beast. Wolff concludes – at the start of the piece, as it happens – that he’s “impressed” by the Tory leader. But then spends the best part of 2,000 words spraying out quotes and observations which will harden the attitudes of Cameron’s detractors, on both the left and the right. Cameron is a “toff”; Boris doubts his “intellectual bona fides”; the Tories have “anti-riffraff” policy on marriage, and so on. Wolff even quotes one Fraser Nelson, saying that he doesn’t “believe for a minute [Cameron]

Peter Hoskin

A warning that applies to the Tories as much as it does to Labour

As James Kirkup says over at the Telegraph, it’s worth paying attention to the credit rating agency Fitch when it says that the UK deficit will need to be cut quicker than is currently planned – to 3.3 percent of GDP by 2015, rather than 4.4 percent.  Throw in similar warnings from the Confederation of British Industry and the Institute of Directors yesterday, and you’ve got a bunch of testimonies which are broadly supportive of the Tory narrative.  You can expect CCHQ to give them plenty of airtime over the next few days.    But, lest it need repeating, the pleas from the CBI and others could well be directed

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Bringing Clegg to the table

My gut feeling is that Cameron will win with a majority. But I had a gut feeling that Carey Mulligan would get Best Actress at the Oscars. When Scotland play rugby, I have a gut feeling that they will win. My gut, alas, has a pretty poor track record. But if I look at the polls, it suggests that Cameron will not win outright, and that Nick Clegg will be needed to form a majority. Today’s daily Sun/YouGov tracker has the Tories with a five-point lead – which suggests that Cameron is 26 seats short of a majority, and that Nick Clegg has just 22 MPs to bring to the

Peter Hoskin

A well-timed change of heart from Lord Paul?

Previously, there were rumblings that Lord Paul was considering quitting the Lords to keep his non-dom status. Today, he has confirmed that he will end his non-dom status and remain in the Lords. If you were being cynical, you might think that there’s been a change of heart so that Labour can ramp up their attacks on the Tories over Lord Ashcroft. But surely Brown & Co. would want to keep their focus on the “serious business” of government, wouldn’t they?

Peter Hoskin

Charlie Whelan’s role in Labour’s election campaign

If you want a sense of how much work Charlie Whelan and Unite are doing on behalf of Gordon Brown, then I’d recommend you read Rachel Sylvester’s column in the Times this morning.  There are the millions of pounds in funding, via the taxpayer, of course.  There’s Unite’s “virtual phone bank,” canvassing votes for Labour.  And then there’s Whelan himself – now almost as involved as ever with the Downing Street operation, and “working closely” with Douglas Alexander on Labour’s election campaign.  This is, I remind you, the Charlie Whelan who was copied into the Smeargate emails, and whose other indiscretions are better described by Martin Bright and Nick Cohen,

Monday

Peter Hoskin

Labour and Tories level in marginals poll (but look to the swing)<br />

I know, I know – there are only so many polls a reader can take.  So I’ll spare you the details from tonight’s YouGov poll, or the Opinium poll in the Daily Express.  But this Populus poll in the Times is worth highlighting, if only because it seems to be attracting the most buzz.  It has Labour and the Tories both on 38 percent across 100 marginal seats.  Neck and neck – or so it seems. But as Anthony Wells points out over at UK Polling Report, what really matters is which marginals this poll covers, and what the swing is.  In this case, the marginals are those numbered 51

David Blackburn

Yet more good money after bad

So, the government is tying the taxpayer to £11bn of new IT contracts before the election, making the Tories’ planned immediate IT cuts very expensive. Is this latest example of a scorched earth policy? Or Labour ‘getting on with the job’? With the polls narrowing, I can’t see Labour setting a fiscal booby-trap that they could well have to de-fuse. But there’s the rub. Brown scorches the turf beneath his feet as he governs: he cannot stop spending money. An £11bn bender is irresponsible in this climate, plus Labour has a baleful record on IT contracts. It has bungled a staggering £26bn on flawed IT systems, many of which were

Peter Hoskin

Voter turnout is still higher in Iraq than in the UK

Ok, so it’s down on the 75 percent achieved in 2005, but it’s still striking – encouraging, even – that voter turnout was at 62 percent for the recent Iraqi general elections.  That’s higher than the 61.4 percent for the last UK general election, and, lest it need saying, we didn’t have to deal with deadly bomb and mortar attacks. With the “chasm” between voters and the political class as it is, in this country, you suspect that our turnout figures will be even smaller this time around.

Peter Hoskin

How much does the public need to know about Jon Venables?

There are many arguments, and many perspectives, when it comes to how much we need to know about Jon Venables’ return to prison.  Yes, too much information – and too much publicity – could forfeit his anonymity.  But too little, and there’s the risk that some serious questions about the probation service could remain unanswered.  The boundaries of transparency need to be set and maintained – if only so similar mistakes and tragedies cannot happen in future.   To be honest, I’m not sure where those boundaries should be set.  But, then again, it seems that the government isn’t either.  Jack Straw is to give a statement to the House

Daniel Korski

Will we lose Turkey?

Earlier this year, Transatlantic Trends, an annual survey of public opinion on both sides of the Atlantic, was published. Key highlights from the survey included a quadrupling of European support for President Obama’s handling of foreign policy. But what really caught my eye was how badly the relationship between the West and Turkey had frayed. 65 percent of Turks do not think it is likely their country will join the EU. Nearly half of Turks polled think Turkey is not really part of the West, while 43 percent think Turkey should not partner with the EU, the US or Russia in solving global problems. The break-down of the alliance between

Peter Hoskin

Guess what Miliband and Mandelson are going on about…

Fourteen years on from “education, education, education,” Labour seems to have hit upon three new priorities for government: “Ashcroft, Ashcroft, Ashcroft”.  Sure, we all knew that they would push this story as hard and as fast as it could go.  But it still says a lot about how they will go about their election campaign, when two senior ministers are still going heavy on the Tory Lord this morning.   In interview with the Guardian, Peter Mandelson says that Ashcroft has got Cameron “by the balls”.  And, in the Telegraph, David Miliband claims that William Hague “can’t be an effective Foreign Secretary,” after his role in the affair.  Some of

Sunday

Mark Bathgate

Bring on the serious economic debate

Why does Britain fall for financial spin so often? The question goes well beyond the great confidence trick of Gordon Brown’s ten years in the Treasury. I’m just back from three weeks in Australia. What’s always struck me in the years I’ve gone there is how different the newspapers/news shows/political debates are. They are well informed about macro-economics, and there is much less of the spin/personality culture of the mainstream media in the UK. Canada is exactly the same. Last week, the Canadian budget was published – a very clear and credible path to getting budget back to balance within three years. One of their officials explained to me that

Peter Hoskin

Have the Lib Dems just saved Labour from a post-election Brown leadership?

To be honest, the leg-flashing that the Lib Dems are doing in front of the Tories and Labour just doesn’t really grab my attention.  Their overtures and innuendo may, or may not, turn out to be significant in a few weeks time – but we need a general election before we can judge either way.  In the meantime, they’d be best off keeping their positioning to themselves, and getting on with an election campaign for which they actually have some fairly attractive policies. This story, though, is worth noting down.  Apparently, in the event of a hung Parliament, Nick Clegg just couldn’t bring himself to work with Gordon Brown.  Labour,

Saturday

Peter Hoskin

Cameron gets his message spot-on

Just a quick post to encourage CoffeeHousers to read David Cameron’s speech to his party’s Welsh conference today. It’s not just the clearest, and most sensible, exposition of the Tories’ economic message that I’ve come across so far – it’s also the finest overall speech that I can remember Cameron giving for some time.  Plenty of hard-hitting passages, both attacking Labour’s record and – crucially – setting out a positive alternative. What really makes it so impressive is the simplicity of its central message: that you can achieve better government, and better services, for less money.  The Tories have been feeling their way around this theme for a while now

Peter Hoskin

Brown seems to have blustered his way through yet another potential crisis

Yesterday, Gordon Brown argued that he curbed defence spending to prevent the public finances from spiralling out of control – but added that he had still given the MoD everything they had asked for.  So, when it’s anything but defence spending, he boasts of all that extra “investment”.  But when it comes to defence, he suddenly grows a fiscal conscience, of sorts.  If we weren’t talking about our country’s ability to fight two wars, there’d be something crudely hilarious about it all. Today, various defence figures have rounded on Brown; arguing, rightly, that his tractor statistics avoided the fundamental point – that, despite increases in the defence budget, the military

Friday

James Forsyth

Why the Tories’ internal polling matters

Iain Martin and Tim Montgomerie are both reporting that the Conservatives have hired YouGov to do polling for them. This might seem like the ultimate Westminster insider story but it will actually have ramifications for the election campaign as a whole. I understand that the Tory deal with YouGov will mean that they will get polling within the day on their morning announcements and the like. They will also have numbers on which moments in the leaders’ debates resonated with the voters about two hours after these debates finish, enabling them to have whole ad campaigns ready to go for the next morning. The nature of the party’s polling has

Robert Whelan

Establishing free schools will be a difficult – but worthwhile – challenge

The small crowd of demonstrators from a group calling itself the Anti-Academies Alliance who gathered outside the Spectator conference on The Schools Revolution yesterday gave an indication of the opposition that Michael Gove and the Conservatives would face, were they to win the election and attempt the radical overhaul of which the British education system is so obviously in need. The thing that came across in our brief but passionate debate with the protestors was their opposition to independence, wherever it may raise its head in schools. Choice, to these people, is anathema. Undeterred, Gove’s speech majored on the virtues of independence. He criticised the present government for waging ‘a