Martin Kettle's Blog, page 56
May 19, 2017
Conservative manifesto: post questions now and join our discussion
Guardian columnists are here to debate the Conservative manifesto and take your questions from 11-1pm (BST). Post your comment to get involved
11.31am BST
Back to the comments, a question from CaptainGrey:
Has the vacuum in the middle caused by Labour’s lurch to the hard left made difficult decisions easier for the Tories to implement? I am thinking particularly of relaxing the pension triple lock (which was becoming more unaffordable year-on-year) and introducing the housing tax to pay for social care, neither of which would be considered had the race been tight.
Terminology of "hard" or other kinds of left aside - that argument goes round-and-round forever - I don't think there's much doubt that the state of the opposition has bought May the space to do things that Cameron/Osborne would like to have done but felt unable to confront - means testing winter fuel and loosening triple lock among them.
Also, crucially, Labour's position on fiscal policy gives May room to be very vague on tax. It will go up after the election. (It nearly always does in first budget of a new parliament, regardless of who is in govt.)
11.22am BST
We’ve also been collecting some questions from Guardian Members via email. Martin Perrie asks:
Is there room in British politics today for a centre right, economically liberal point of view? I mean the view of the FT, the Economist, and probably orange book Lib Dems and the George Osborne part of the Tories.
11.13am BST
First up Rafael Behr joins us in the comments, in response to a reader going by BrokenLogic, who asks:
For me [the manifesto] seems positioned within the European tradition of Christian Democracy. May is shooting to become a Poundland Angela. I think that’s a tone about which a national consensus could be built. And I like that there is a real attempt to win a mandate to find solutions to some big issues that will almost inevitably be unpopular (which is not to say I agree they are the right solutions).
Poundland Angela is very good. I do think it is a shame that a kind of alliance of temperament and political outlook between the PM and the German Chancellor is theoretically available - which would be good for Britain and Europe - but the fact of Brexit and the crass way May has approached it snuffed out the possibility.
I think one of the tragedies of May's time in Downing Street might turn out to be that she thought she could spend her political capital (ie her capacity to annoy the Tory right) doing things other than Brexit (all the soft, market intervention stuff) - and so will have to compensate the Mail /Con grassroots with the Euro-bashing. And that process means she won't achieve any of the other things she has said she wants to do. She seems to think Brexit is just a background noise to some other agenda. In reality, it is the only thing on her agenda.
11.07am BST
Our writers are joining us below the line now – we’ll be posting some of the answers to your questions, and interesting debate points from you, in this space. Get involved in the comments!
3.22pm BST
The Conservative party launched its election manifesto on Thursday, with Theresa May setting out her party’s ambitions at an event in West Yorkshire.
The prime minister said she was presenting a “new contract between government and people” and some commentators suggested this was a clear attempt to break with past Tory thinking and to “redefine modern Conservatism”.
Continue reading...
May 18, 2017
Conservative manifesto: Mayism has arrived, but where are the Mayites? | Martin Kettle
At the end of her election manifesto launch press conference in Halifax, Theresa May was asked whether the document she had just launched embodied something we could now describe as “Mayism”. Her reply was emphatic. “There is no Mayism,” she intoned, “there is good solid conservatism which puts the interests of the country and the interests of ordinary working people at the heart of everything we do in government.”
In her signed manifesto foreword, May writes: “It is the responsibility of leaders to be straight with people.” In that final press conference answer, however, May was not being straight. For there is emphatically something that is worth calling, and understanding as, Mayism. It is embodied throughout the 2017 Conservative manifesto. It was expounded very clearly in her press conference speech. If she wins this election, over the next five years Britain will be the test bed for whether it works. Most important of all, however, Mayism is a very different form of Toryism from the one that most of us have spent our lives with.
Related: May signals break with Thatcherism in manifesto for 'country and community'
Related: The Conservative manifesto: our writers on how the party’s pledges stack up | Hugh Muir and others
Continue reading...May 16, 2017
Ian Brady escaped hanging – and defined attitudes to the death penalty | Martin Kettle
Apart from their sheer horror, the Moors murders stayed in the public imagination because they marked the end of capital punishment
Ian Brady retained his dark grip on the British imagination right to the very end. The 1965 police photograph of the Moors murderer stared out from the front pages once more this week to mark his death at 79, just as they have done so often ever since Brady was convicted of three murders in May 1966. Few criminals of any era are front-page news for half a century; Brady and his accomplice, Myra Hindley, were unquestionably two of them.
The most obvious reason for this 50-year notoriety is, of course, the sheer horror of the crimes that Brady planned and committed. The details of his tortures and acts are unbearable. The transcript of victims’ pleas, never mind the tapes that were heard in court, are as shocking as anything one could ever encounter.
Related: Ian Brady obituary
Related: Goodbye, my darlings: remembering the trauma of the execution of Ronald Ryan | Cameron Muir
Continue reading...May 11, 2017
The problem with Labour’s manifesto isn’t the ideas, it’s the credibility | Martin Kettle
How seriously should one take the Labour manifesto? In a serious election it ought to matter a lot. Yet everything about Labour at the moment – the manifesto included – reflects the sleepless battle for control of the party, rather than any serious engagement with non-Labour Britain. Oddly, though, this means there is some unity about the manifesto. The Corbynites want to run on a leftwing manifesto for reasons of ideology, but Jeremy Corbyn’s opponents want that too, so that Corbyn can own the defeat they expect on 8 June.
The much larger questions, especially to the three-quarters of British voters who are not Labour supporters, are whether this is a plausible manifesto, and whether there is a large and sustained appetite for a government dedicated to rolling back the Thatcherite counter-revolution. Don’t rule that out. But a manifesto is also only as plausible as the leader who presents it. I’d be lying if I didn’t say I think most voters have made up their minds on that.
Too often Labour offers an attitude and a piety rather than an analysis: scrap this, ban that, reverse the other
Related: Labour's draft manifesto: key policies analysed
Continue reading...May 8, 2017
Karita Mattila review – fabulous and fearlessly direct singing
Wigmore Hall, London
The Finnish soprano was formidable in a recital that took in Brahms, Wagner and Berg
Karita Mattila swept on to the Wigmore Hall platform and scooped the audience into the palm of her hand for two hours. In part, that’s because the soprano is such a fabulous and fearlessly direct stage performer, but also well up for a bit of diva parody in three superb encores by Hollaender, Merikanto and Strauss. Fundamentally, though, it’s about the rich nuance of her vocal sound, which still ranges from the full-on operatic to the intimate, all delivered with a laser-sharp awareness of both text and context.
Starting with Brahms’s Zigeunerlieder, Mattila was boldly full-blooded from the word go, with no trace of vibrato, though there was just the occasional tonal scoop early on. But she expertly narrowed the focus in the most inward of the songs, and for the rest of the evening she was in her element across the full range of the voice.
Continue reading...May 5, 2017
Labour's local losses – Politics Weekly podcast
Anushka Asthana is joined by Martin Kettle, Deborah Mattinson and Sam Tarry to discuss what the local council results mean for the general election. Plus France prepares to elect its new president
Labour has suffered through a bruising set of local election results ahead of next month’s general election as the Conservatives take advantage of a collapse in the Ukip vote and a lack of enthusiasm for Labour in areas once considered its heartlands.
Joining Anushka Asthana to discuss it all are Deborah Mattinson of Britain Thinks, Guardian columnist Martin Kettle and Labour councillor and former Corbyn campaign manager Sam Tarry.
Continue reading...May 4, 2017
The best Lib Dems can hope for? To stop being patronised | Martin Kettle
The party is bubbling with optimism, but after its 2015 wipeout it’s not about to overturn the status quo in this election
There is a gaping Emmanuel Macron-shaped hole in British electoral politics, but no one to fill it. When I wrote this recently, I got a cheerfully indignant email from a Liberal Democrat ex-MP. How could I dismiss Tim Farron’s claims so easily, he complained. Like Macron, he said, Farron was young, liberal, progressive and pro-Europe. And in this general election Farron is campaigning on Brexit, “the overriding national and international issue” of the day, “rather than on mending pavements and saving post offices”. Watch this space, he wrote.
Is he right to be optimistic? It’s certainly true that the mood of the Liberal Democrats is bubbling as the 2017 general election gets under way. Farron is fighting a genial and feisty street campaign among real voters, as he showed during a visit to Oxford West this week. When the results of yesterday’slocal elections are digested, the party is likely to be even more chipper.
In 2015, the electorate left the Lib Dems out cold on the canvas. Merely to recover those losses would be a triumph
Related: Tories attack Labour over inheritance tax and spending plans
Continue reading...May 3, 2017
Theresa May: talking loudly but carrying a small stick | Martin Kettle
The opinion polls may show the Conservatives nearly 20 points ahead of Labour, but the signs from Theresa May’s camp this week are that they are getting surprisingly twitchy. Improbable though this may seem – and it almost certainly is a bluff – it is a reminder that May has put her own job on the line for the next five weeks, and that she will be destroyed politically if her snap poll does not work.
All the signs are that May was caught on the hop by the counter-attack from Europe against her vision of Brexit, which she denounced in Downing Street this afternoon. The fractious dinner with the commission president, Jean-Claude Juncker, was followed by a rare public reprimand from Angela Merkel and now the uncompromising speech by the EU’s chief negotiator Michel Barnier, who warned this morning that the process will neither be quick nor painless – even though May tries to claim it will be both.
In one sense the EU attacks are just what May might have wanted … they allow her to pose as Britannia
Continue reading...April 20, 2017
The most important election for Britain is the one in France | Martin Kettle
Britain’s political class has a long and damaging record of not taking politics in continental Europe seriously. A collective insularity tempered only by a worship of all things American ensures that a minor event like this week’s congressional byelection in the suburbs of Atlanta is more likely to register inside the British bubble than, say, the critical contest hotting up for the leadership of Spain’s influential but divided Socialist party.
Yet small buds of change are beginning to open. By far the most important election for Britain right now is the presidential contest taking place across the Channel in France, where the first of two rounds of voting is happening on Sunday. It is hard to remember a French election that has received as much attention in Britain – and for good reason.
Yet if the polls are right – a big if – Macron will overturn the French political order when the contest concludes
Related: François Fillon moves back into contention in French presidential race
Continue reading...April 18, 2017
May has called a snap general election. Our writers respond | Zoe Williams and others
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