Julian Astle

Gillian Duffy: will she vote AV? (Photo: Rex)

There has been a lot of movement in voting intention during the AV referendum campaign, but things seem now to have settled down, for the time being at least.

At the outset, Conservative voters were 2:1 against changing the electoral system for Westminster; today they are roughly 4:1 against. Lib Dem voters started out in favour and have remained so – also by a margin of 4:1. There hasn’t been much polling data for supporters of the SNP and Plaid, but what information we have suggests they are (or at least were, three weeks ago) at least 3:1 in favour. It seems reasonable to assume that a majority of UKIP and Green voters will also be in the YES camp where their party leaders are.

Of course, Conservative… Read More

British expats have forthright views on the 'old country' (Photo: Alamy)

It’s more than two years since Philip Blond launched his own Zeitgeist with an article proclaiming the Rise of the Red Tories and I’m still to meet anyone, Blond included, who can tell me what a Red Tory is.

One possibility is that he’s talking about the sunburnt English ex-pats among whom I am currently holidaying on the south coast of Spain.

A flick through the local English-language newsletter here – edited by a man so cross about the state of the “old country” that his articles are littered with self-censored expletives – reveals an opinion that is particularly widely held, apparently without irony, within this emigrant community: that England is suffering from excessive levels of immigration. The local Spanish probably don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

David Cameron may have… Read More

Clegg has nothing to cry about (Photo: Rii Schroer)

Watching Nick Clegg and his Liberal Democrat cabinet colleagues is like watching five men in a boat, riding the rapids, trying to avoid the rocks: you can tell how much trouble they are in by the speed at which they paddle. In recent weeks they have been paddling ever faster, pushing their social mobility plans forward, pulling Andrew Lansley’s health reforms back, all the time trying to steer a course between dangers.

What no one knows, however, is whether skill can save them or whether they are already holed below the water line. And even if they are not, no one knows where they are heading – whether all this steering and rowing is taking place upstream of the political equivalent of Niagara… Read More

Readers of this newspaper’s Sunday edition might have seen this article claiming that the Lib Dems are considering changing their logo, their name, their direction and their leader. If all of that were true, it would be quite a scoop.

At the risk of being a killjoy, I thought I might just explore which of these claims is remotely plausible.

First off, the logo. Parties regularly refresh their branding and I understand the Lib Dems are considering doing so at some stage during this parliament. This may or may not involve changes to the logo (we wait with bated breath!).

But what of the party’s name, direction and leader? These three questions are far more fundamental, and are intimately linked.

The Liberal Democrat party was created by the merger of the Liberal Party and the Social Democratic Party (it was briefly even called the Social and Liberal Democrats before good sense intervened). It remains an internal coalition of centrist liberals and Left-of-centre… Read More

Even at the last TV debate, Nick and Dave agreed...

The Westminster village is getting excited about Nick Clegg’s unguarded comment, caught on mic, in which he tells David Cameron (after their joint appearance at a post-budget event today): “If we keep doing this we won’t find anything to bloody disagree on in the bloody TV debates.”

It’s hardly up there with the Gordon Brown, Gillian Duffy show, but it’s revealing nonetheless. Not because it shows the two men agree on everything – anyone working in No 10 or the Cabinet Office will tell you they don’t – but because it identifies a very real dilemma: how, after five years working side by side in government, are Cameron and Clegg going to approach the 2015 TV debates? How, for example, will they respond to… Read More

The choice is only non-socialist alternatives to Thatcher

Question: What have Andrew Adonis, Chris Huhne and Greg Clark got in common? Answer: Thirty years ago, they all joined the SDP.

Which is why, last night, we at CentreForum, the liberal think tank , invited these three men, now representing three different parties, to debate the legacy of the SDP at an event to mark the 30th anniversary of the party’s formation.

Most of the discussion was of interest only to those involved at the time, so I’ll spare you the details. But one thought occurred as I listened to the speakers: that the SDP may not have “broken the mould” of British politics as they set out to do, but they did succeed in creating a less polarised political culture which continues to punish any party that moves too far from the centre… Read More

Lib Dems support intervention in Libya (Photo: Reuters)

The Liberal Democrats, as part of the Coalition Government, are about to commit British forces to military action in Libya. When they do, they will have the strong backing of the party at every level.

Some, recalling the images of Charles Kennedy at the front of the million-man march against the Iraq war, might find this suprising. If they do, they misunderstand both the party and the reason for its opposition to that war.

The Lib Dems see themselves as “law-abiding liberal interventionists”. Anyone trying to understand the positions they have adopted over the last twenty years needs to understand that they take both parts of this definition seriously.

Their commitment to liberal intervention – to the use of military power to defend human rights and to prevent humanitarian disasters – was demonstrated most clearly in the 1990s when the… Read More

I like Danny Finkelstein. And, despite being on the other side of the blue/yellow coalition, often find myself agreeing with him. But I can’t resist pulling him up on his piece in today’s Times in which he tries to make the case for voting ‘No’ to AV.

If you can get behind the paywall, it’s worth reading the whole thing. But here’s the key passage:
Which all brings me to the reason why I intend to vote “no”. The alternative vote will not reduce the number of safe seats. In seats where the winning candidates have more than 50 per cent of the vote under the present system, or are more than 20 per cent ahead of their nearest rival, the MPs that win under first-past-the-post will win under AV. So AV is about determining how marginal seats are allocated.
To understand why this isn’t true, it’s worth reading this excellent… Read More

Over at the Spectator’s Coffee House, Peter Hoskin draws attention to the remarkable increase in the number of Academies over the last 15 months from 203 to 465. This is in stark contrast to Free Schools, only eight of which are due to open in time for the next academic year in September. Which begs the question, which of these two reforms is the more important?

At first blush, “Academy” and “Free School” appear to be two different names for the same thing: a privately run, publicly funded school in the state sector. But there is one crucial difference. Academies replace existing schools while Free Schools stand alongside them. Academy providers are supposed to turn around failing schools; Free Schools to compete with them.

One study of school choice in England likens the task of finding a place at a good school to a game of… Read More

Schools are Nick Clegg's best chance to save the Liberal Democrats (Photo: PA)

Nick Clegg is an unusually frank politician as he proved again at his party’s spring conference when he admitted to having been royally “stuffed” over tuition fees.

It’s hard for the Lib Dems to rehearse the reasons for their predicament without sounding like they’re making excuses. It is true that they didn’t win the election and therefore couldn’t expect to implement their manifesto in full. It is also true that both the other parties were committed to higher fees so the Lib Dems’ negotiating hand could barely have been weaker. No matter. They signed the pledge; now they’re paying the price. The important question is where they go next.

Incredibly, there are still some Lib Dems who want to fight the next general election… Read More