Nick clegg

The coalition faces a by-election test

The court’s decision that the Oldham East and Saddleworth election must be re-run because Phil Woolas was guilty of illegal practices under election law presents the coalition with a dilemma. Do both parties campaign fully in this three-way marginal? Oldham East and Saddleworth is number 83 on the Tory target seats list, it would require just over a five percent swing for them to win. But the Lib Dems are even closer, only a hundred odd votes behind Labour. If both of the coalition parties went all out for it, Labour would have a much better chance of holding on and winning the seat would be a welcome morale boost

The rise of Marco Rubio

Of all the good news that the American Right is savouring at the moment, Marco Rubio’s victory must be near the top. Rubio won 49 percent of Florida’s vote, defeating Democratic Congressman Kendrick Meek (20 percent) and (at 30 percent) Governor Charlie Crist, a frightfully ambitious former Republican, turned independent, who reportedly flirted with joining the Senate Democratic caucus, if elected. Rubio, a rising conservative star, promises to glow like the Sunshine State that he will represent.   For years, Republicans have been chided — rather unfairly — as the party of old, bald white men. Rubio undermines this accusation. Just 39 years old, Rubio exudes warmth and good humour.

The Lib Dems, breaking doors in anger

This one, from the Mail on Sunday, needs adding to the scrapbook: “Colchester MP Bob Russell’s fury over the Coalition’s housing benefit cuts boiled over at a stormy private meeting with the Deputy Prime Minister. To the astonishment of fellow Lib Dem MPs, it ended with Mr Russell storming out and slamming the Commons’ committee room door behind him. Witnesses said last night: ‘He took the door off its hinges.’ In a bizarre twist, Mr Russell’s ally and fellow Lib Dem MP Mike Hancock – himself a fierce critic of Mr Clegg – tried to spare his colleague’s blushes by creeping back the following morning to repair the door before

The ginger rodent

I wonder what they’ll come up with for Uncle Vince? Nick Clegg is a closet Tory (nice homophobic overtone there), and Danny Alexander reminds anti-persecution supremo Harriet Harman of a ginger rodent. Alexander deigned to respond, saying:  ‘I am proud to be ginger and rodents do valuable work cleaning up the mess others lead behind. Red Squirrel deserves to survive, unlike Labour.’   Aside from being witless, the problem with Labour’s assault  on senior Lib Dem politicians is that each one makes a future Lib-Lab pact ever more unlikely. After all, there aren’t so many Lib Dems to insult.   

The pros and cons of tweaking the housing benefit cuts

It says a lot about the Lib Dems that a meeting between their party leader and deputy leader can throw up so many policy differences. When Nick Clegg and Simon Hughes chatted behind closed doors yesterday, the latter sought concessions over the coalition’s housing benefit cuts – the cuts that Clegg then had to defend in the House. This morning, it was reported that he might just get some of them, even though Downing St are denying the story. Regardless of the outcome, the situation is reminiscent of the child benefit cut for higher-rate taxpayers. A policy was announced, only for the coalition to start pulling back from it in

Clegg holds no punches

Third time’s the charm? Not when it comes it Deputy Prime Minister’s Questions it’s not. Nick Clegg put in an effective performance this afternoon, but – just like the previous two sessions – there was rather more heat generated than light. So far as Labour are concerned, this monthly Q&A is little more than an opportunity to barrack the Lib Dem leader – and they set about the task with undisguised relish. Unfortunately for them, though, Nick Clegg bites back. Hard. Answering a question from Chris Bryant – in which the Labour MP referred to coalition housing benefit cuts as a “cleansing” of the poor from city centres – he

Why a LibCon coalition might last beyond 2015

May 2015 is an age away in political terms. But the question of what happens to the coalition after the next election is too politically interesting to be able to resist speculating on; even if this speculation is almost certainly going to be overtaken by events. Over at ConservativeHome, Paul Goodman asks if Cameron and Osborne share Francis Maude’s view that the coalition should continue after the next election even if the Tories win an outright majority. My impression is that they do. If the Tories won a majority of between 10 and 30, I’d be surprised if Cameron didn’t try and keep the coalition going. There are four main

Confusion reigns | 24 October 2010

A hoary old foreign correspondent once advised me on how to report on a new country when parachuted in during a crisis. I was about to be sent to Russia to cover the rouble collapse, when it looked like the whole country was about to implode. I was more than a little nervous. “When you write your first piece you will be completely disoriented, so just write that confusion reigns. No one will know any better,” he said. It feels a bit like that with UK politics at the moment. What are we to make of the latest polls that show the majority of the population backing the Coalition’s cuts and yet Labour

The IDS plan approaches consensus status

Plenty of attention for Nick Clegg’s listening, reading and smoking habits this morning, as well as his appearance on the Andrew Marr show. But it is another of Marr’s guests who has made perhaps the most important intervention of the day: the shadow work and pensions secretary, Douglas Alexander. Here’s how the Beeb website reports it: “Mr Alexander also said he backed ‘in principle’ the coalition’s plan to replace all out-of-work benefits with a single ‘universal credit’ payment. He said such a move was ‘sensible’ but he would be ‘scrutinising’ the government ‘very carefully’ over its £2bn start-up costs.” If true, then it leaves the the parties in a surprisingly

Cameron’s morals

By his own admission, to today’s Mail, David Cameron is not afraid of unpopularity. On hearing this, a few quizzical grins may break across his critics’ faces, but, undeniably, the government’s fate was cast this week: either its fiscal plan will work or it won’t. Cameron is unperturbed because he is sure that he is right – not only in his political and economic judgement, but also in terms of morality. It is ‘right’ that everyone contributes, ‘right’ that the affluent forgo some state-awarded privileges, ‘right’ that those who have scrounged are made to toil, ‘right’ that those who were subsumed by welfare dependency are freed, ‘right’ that Britain honour its pledge

Labour’s Kill Clegg strategy

One question swirling through the sea of British politics is this: how will Ed Miliband act towards the Lib Dems? The Labour leader certainly didn’t flinch from attacking the yellow brigade during the leadership contest, at one point calling them a “disgrace to the traditions of liberalism.” But surely he’ll have to soften that rhetoric in case the next election delivers another bout of frenzied coalition negotiations. Which is why Andy Burnham’s article in the Guardian today is worth noting down. In making his point – that the Lib Dems haven’t won the pupil premium they sought – he does all he can to force a wedge between Nick Clegg

Clegg hits back at the IFS

It’s fast becoming a tradition: when the IFS calls the government’s work “regressive,” send for Nick Clegg to take the think tank on. He wrote an article for the FT debunking their analysis back in August. And, today, he does the same via an interview in the Guardian. It’s pretty forceful stuff from the Deputy PM, as this quote testifies: “I think you have to call a spade a spade. We just fundamentally disagree with the IFS. It goes back to a culture of how you measure fairness that took root under Gordon Brown’s time, where fairness was seen through one prism and one prism only which was the tax

Osborne’s inoculation strategy has worked

Several of tomorrow’s newspapers lead on the IFS’ conclusion that those on the lowest income will suffer most from the cuts. This charge is problematic for the conclusion but far less problematic than it would have been if we hadn’t spent so much of the last few weeks discussing George Osborne’s decision to remove child benefit from families with a higher rate taxpayer in them. That change, however unpopular it may have been with normally Tory voters, inoculated the coalition against the charge that it was trying to balance the budget on the backs of the poor. Osborne’s preparation of the ground has not, though, stopped the Lib Dems slipping

Clegg sweetens the pill with a fairness premium

Only five days to go until the spending review – and after weeks of emphasis on the cuts we’re about to see, the government has today unveiled a new spending commitment. It comes courtesy of Nick Clegg: a new “fairness premium” targeted at the least well-off young people. Lib Dem Voice has full details here, but the basic point is that £7 billion will be spent, across 4 years, on programmes for disadvantaged 2 to 20 year-olds. Much of this will go towards the “pupil premium” that we’ve heard so much about, and which should advance school choice in the most deprived areas. Putting aside his genuine commitment to it,

Cable and Clegg scrambling to repel errant MPs

The Lib Dems have met the Browne report with a mixture of cordiality and outright antipathy. According to the Guardian, Greg Mulholland is the ring-leader of a band who will vote against a fee rise come what may. Lib Dem ministers are describing the Browne report as ‘unpalatable’ in its current form but recognise that fees must rise and are ‘keeping their powder dry’. The stumbling block is Browne’s recommendation that interest free loans be scrapped. This stark move was to be offset by raising the threshold and tapering interest rates to protect the disadvantaged. There are also concerns that the affluent will be able to pay off their debt

Huhne and the universal benefit conundrum

Chris Huhne has given an interview to the Telegraph. According to the front page report, the Energy Secretary has nothing to say about nuclear power, new wind farms or energy security; but rather a lot to say about economic and social policies that are strictly beyond his purview. Jeremy Hunt’s belief that child benefit should be limited across the board is dismissed because there are ‘limits to how much we can achieve through changes in the tax and benefits system’ – this week’s Spectator argues otherwise. Huhne also registers his profound cynicism for the marriage tax break – no surprises there and he has a point that austerity should not

Cameron’s tangled web

How do you get from David Cameron to Simon Cowell in two, easy steps? Answer: Andy Coulson. The former News of the World editor is, of course, Cameron’s director of communications – but he also happens to be on friendly terms with the X-Factor impresario. We set out this, and all the other tangled relationships around the Prime Minister, in a spider graph for this week’s magazine. From Nick Clegg to the designer Anya Hindmarch, from Steve Hilton to Baroness Ashton: it’s not a map of the government, but rather of the people both in and around No.10 who form what we call the New Establishment. To see them in

Cameron sets the mood for Birmingham

It’s that time of year again: Conservative Party conference. And with it comes wall-to-wall David Cameron. Our PM has a couple of interviews in the newspapers today and, to accompany them, he slotted in an appearance on the Marr show earlier. In all three, he hops neatly across the all same lily pads – spending cuts, IDS’s historic benefit reforms and the defence budget – making the points and arguments you might expect. Yet two snippets stand out, and are worth pasting into the scrapbook. First, Cameron’s claim on Marr that, “We have got to ask, are there some areas of universal benefits that are no longer affordable?” It may

Fraser Nelson

Society 3, The State 0

Cameron and Osborne may just be about to pull off something incredible. This time last year, The Spectator ran a cover story about a new proposal which we could revolutionise welfare: the Universal Credit. It was an IDS idea: he’d sweep away all 50-odd benefits, and replace it with a system that ran on a simple principle – if someone did extra work, they’d get to keep most of the money they earned. It meant a bureaucratic overhaul, of a system that controls the lives of 5.9 million people. The resistance from HM Treasury, the architect of the tax credit system, was as fierce as it was predictable. But Clegg

A small step for Labour, not a giant leap

I had expected Ed Miliband to do pretty well in the polls. He’s unknown, and voters haven’t had a chance to dislike him yet. That’s not an insult – familiarity breeds contempt in politics, and the public are normally quite quick to give a new guy the benefit of the doubt. Witness the Clegg bubble. But tomorrow’s Guardian shows precious little sign of a conference bounce. The two parties were level before the conferences – a remarkable achievment for a leaderless party. The Tories took three years to do the same. It was one of many reasons that inspired our cover story last week, “Labour leaps forward”. The illustration, by