We Tories are in a state of disbelief about Jeremy Corbyn, Daily Telegraph, Boris Johnson

How did it get to the point where a Sinn Fein-loving, monarchy-baiting Leftie could lead the Opposition? Conservatives can't believe their luck

                            

         

By Boris Johnson

9:11PM BST 16 Aug 2015

It begins with a look of slow and wondering amazement – as if he hardly dares believe his luck; and then the certainty builds, millisecond by millisecond. Then the eyebrows go up even higher, and the mouth gapes and the eyes pop and the epiglottis vibrates as he lets out a long, whooping yell of sheer incredulous ecstasy.

That is how police chief Brody reacts in the last reel of Jaws when, by some fluke, he manages to shoot a bullet right into the oxygen tank in the mouth of the shark, and the ravening fish improbably explodes. That is frankly how we in the Tory party feel as we watch what is happening in the Labour movement today.

If these polls are right (and that is a pretty big if these days) then we are at that preliminary stage in Roy Scheider’s masterful portrait of the joyful police chief. We aren’t yet whooping, but our eyebrows are twitching north in incredulity. We are filled with disbelief that this can really be taking place, a distrust of the evidence of our senses.

Read more here:

More on Jeremy Corbyn

Nick Clegg Could Be Prime Minister For Month After …… Says Lib Dem Sir Nick Harvey, Huffington Post

Nick Clegg could serve as prime minister for a month after the general election until a new coalition is formed, a senior Lib Dem MP has suggested.

Former defence minister Sir Nick Harvey said unlike the 2010 coalition deal which was hammered out in just five days, any negotiations after this May's poll should take much longer.

In an interview with The Huffington Post, Harvey said this would require an "interim government" to be in place while political parties haggled over the formation of a new administration.

Harvey said as the incumbent, David Cameron should remain in Downing Street until a deal was struck. But that if the Conservative leader "was so fucked off" he wanted to leave then there was "no reason" why Clegg could not fill the role - assuming of course the deputy prime minister keeps his seat.

The veteran Lib Dem MP also said it would be "much harder" for the party leadership to convince its members to vote for another coalition and said he would be "certainly willing" to argue in favour of the party staying out of power.

Harvey, who predicted Ed Miliband would wake up on 8 May with the most MPs, also said the Lib Dems could fill half its ministerial positions in a future coalition with members of the House of Lords - if the party sees its number of MPs reduced to around 30.

He was speaking to HufPost following the publication of his book, After the Rose Garden, which examines the mistakes the Lib Dems made during the 2010 negotiations with the Tories.

"I personally think that they should take at least a month," Harvey said when asked how long any negotiations should last. "And I think that what you need during the course of that month is some sort of interim government. Where you've got a prime minister and home secretary and a chancellor. And maybe a deputy prime minister. I don't think it is right to appoint a government of 121 members until such time as you have a deal. If the deal is going to take a month, you could just appoint a government of eight or ten ministers.

The decade of despair: The businessmen warning that Miliband wants to take Britain back to the 1970s are right - it would be a catastrophe, writes DOMINIC SANDBROOK

 First, the Boots boss, now a string of other senior business figures are queuing up to attack Labour’s beleaguered leader.

In the past few days, it has seemed that Ed Miliband is heading for all-out war with the High Street over his increasingly strident attacks on Britain’s businesses.

As Lord Rose, the man who saved M&S, put it in yesterday’s Mail, the Labour leader is in danger of looking like a ‘Seventies throwback’.

Indeed, with his planned National Insurance and corporation tax rises, as well as his attacks on so-called business ‘predators’, Mr Miliband seems determined to rekindle the spirit of the decade that fashion forgot.

Labour MPs naturally shrink at comparisons with the Seventies, when strikes brought the country to a standstill and Jim Callaghan’s government was forced to go cap in hand to the IMF for the biggest bailout in history.

Yet from his cynical pledge to cap energy prices to his controversial mansion tax, Mr Miliband seems intent on banishing all memories of the New Labour years, when Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were eager to prove their business-friendly credentials.

For all Labour’s synthetic outrage, therefore, I think Lord Rose was entirely justified in recalling the climate of the mid-Seventies, which he called ‘the old days of punitive taxes on business-people, of class war and the stirring of resentment’.

In 1974, rather like today, Britain faced a choice between a governing Conservative Party that often seemed out of touch with its own supporters, and a lacklustre Labour Opposition happiest when bashing business and pandering to its Left-wing activists.

Read more here:

Comment:

If you want to see the United Kingdom bankrupt by punitive taxes, and ruined by neo-communist/left wing/socialist and self interested parties like the Greens and Scottish Nationalist  Parties and see Alex Salmond  as Deputy Prime Minister intent on breaking up the United Kingdom because of his self-inflated ego. vote for Labour, If you want our country to continue to see economic growth,  well the choice is easy, vote the Conservatives.  I know what choice I will be making and it’s not voting for Labour

Labour's private hospital stitch-up: Shocking evidence of how the Left sabotaged NHS success story by Guy Adams & Sophie Borland, Daily Mail Story.

Shocking evidence of how Labour and union figures had the first privately run NHS hospital declared a failure has been uncovered by the Daily Mail.

There are growing calls for an inquiry into how Hinchingbrooke in Cambridgeshire was rated ‘inadequate’ by the Care Quality Commission watchdog – only months after winning an award for patient care.

But the Mail has learned that:

·         Individuals who helped draw up the CQC’s damning report have close ties to the Labour Party and unions which oppose NHS privatisation.

·         The local NHS body, which suddenly slashed the hospital’s funding and imposed arbitrary fines, is heavily influenced by Labour activists.

·         The watchdog’s lead inspector, Dr Jonathan Fielden, was previously a senior member of the doctors’ trade union, the British Medical Association, and has warned of the dangers of privatisation.

·         A second inspector, Dr Nigel Sturrock, has been associated with the Keep Our NHS Public group.

·         And a doctor employed by the hospital who is suspected of briefing the CQC about its supposed failings happens to be the Labour candidate to be the area’s MP. Dr Nik Johnson is believed to have influenced the report’s severe criticism of children’s services in the A&E unit.

The inspection report by the CQC last week led to Circle, the firm running Hinchingbrooke, withdrawing its contract. The hospital has now been placed in special measures and could be closed down.

MPs whose constituents include hospital staff and patients are urging the Health Secretary to begin an inquiry into the inspection. They say the report’s findings are entirely at odds with an award last May naming it as the best performing NHS trust in the country.

David Campbell Bannerman, Tory MEP for the Eastern Region, said: ‘This is a Labour stitch-up. I wonder how many of the CQC’s other inspectors are quietly sympathetic to keeping the NHS public

Read more here:

Alex Salmond to demand tax autonomy despite oil price by Simon Johnson, The Telegraph

Alex Salmond

Alex Salmond has said SNP MPs would demand full tax powers to support a Labour Government despite warnings this would mean billions of pounds more of Scottish spending cuts thanks to the plummeting oil price

.

The former First Minister’s intervention came as Scottish Parliament research showed nearly 16,000 North Sea jobs are at risk, the largest threat to employment faced by the country since the Ravenscraig steel plant closed 23 years ago.

He predicted the Nationalists could win a “barrow load” of seats in May’s general election and confirmed that a second independence referendum would not be among his conditions for propping up a minority Ed Miliband government.

Instead he said the SNP would demand “home rule”, which he defined as control over everything except defence and foreign affairs, meaning the Barnett formula would be abolished and Holyrood given control over all taxes and spending.

But Unionist parties warned this would mean an additional £18.6 billion of spending cuts to public services in Scotland thanks to North Sea oil prices having nosedived to around $50 per barrel.

Read more here:

Further Reading

Oil crisis: SNP under fire over forecasts refusal. The Scotsman Newspaper

Pro-Union parties claim Alex Salmond's crusade could cost Scotland billions. The Daily Record

Salmond power bid slated as ‘back seat driving’ Daily Express

Labour MPs tell Ed to sack Balls or we will lost the next Election: Shadow Chancellor under fire after he blocks extra health tax.

  A whispering campaign against Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls has started

  Mr Balls is fighting battle with Andy Burnham over their manifesto policies 

  He has categorically ruled out a ring-fenced tax to boost funding for NHS

  MPs have now put Labour's Ed Miliband under pressure to sack Mr Balls

  A whispering campaign against Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls has started

  Mr Balls is fighting battle with Andy Burnham over their manifesto policies 

  He has categorically ruled out a ring-fenced tax to boost funding for NHS

  MPs have now put Labour's Ed Miliband under pressure to sack Mr Balls

Read more here:

OUTRAGE: Labour propose 15 per cent death tax, Daily Express

Ed Miliband, Labour Leader.

Ed Miliband’s team were accused of plotting a compulsory levy that could snatch £46,000 from the average estate.

Critics warned that families still grieving for lost relatives could face a “secret tax bombshell” under the proposals.

The row was last night threatening to derail the Labour leader’s campaign to highlight party ­election promises.

And it was also being seen as a slap in the face to the hundreds of thousands of Daily Express ­readers who backed this newspaper’s ­crusade for the abolition of ­inheritance tax.

Tory Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt said: “People who save all their lives deserve better than a secret tax bombshell if Labour were ever to get in.”

The death tax proposals were exposed when comments made by shadow health secretary Andy Burnham – at a conference ­organised by the Left-wing Fabian Society last month – were revealed yesterday.

Labour chiefs previously abandoned plans for a levy to cover the costs of social care before the last general election in 2010 – but Mr Burnham confirmed the measure was being revived in “internal party discussions”.

Read more here:

Further Reading

Labour death tax proposal is the last thing we need, Daily Express

It's good to tax the dead, they don't vote, jokes Ed Miliband's guru friend Lord Glasman

TAXPAYERS would be the equivalent of £5,500 worse off if union-backed Ed Miliband became Prime Minister, Justice Secretary Chris Grayling has warned.

'Homes for votes deal in council election fix': Petition claims polling for mayor in London's Tower Hamlets was fraudulent. Daily Mail

Mayor Lutfur Rahman

  Islamic voters allegedly told to be 'good Muslims' by electing Lutfur Rahman

  His supporters handed out lollipops to the children of voters, it is claimed

  Mr Rahman, serving a second term as borough mayor, won by 3,000 votes

Voters were promised council houses if they re-elected their mayor, a court heard yesterday.

Islamic sections of the electorate were told they should be ‘good Muslims’ by voting for Mayor Lutfur Rahman, it was said.

In a further bid to win votes, supporters of Mr Rahman allegedly handed out lollipops to the children of voters in Tower Hamlets, East London.

A petition brought before the High Court claims the re-election of the mayor in May was fraudulent ‘in a variety of forms’.

It alleges that council officers were bullied into ‘securing a certain number of votes’ and were threatened with the sack if they refused.

Read more here:

Further reading

His memoirs, serialised in the Mail, convulsed Westminster. Now Gordon Brown's spin doctor gives his withering verdict on the two Eds: Paranoid, confused, and their policies are a great, steaming pile of fudge Daily Mail

Ed Miliband and Ed Balls.

  Damian McBride claims Miliband and Balls run 'dysfunctional' Labour Party

  They're confused, lacking clear policies and a target audience, he claims 

  Says Labour could win by treating election like a Gordon Brown-era Budget 

Just nine months before the next General Election, the Labour Party has no positive messages to communicate to anyone about why they should vote for them. It has no policies which will persuade them, and no clear idea who its target audience is. And it’s being run in a totally dysfunctional way.

So how do the two Eds - Miliband and Balls - do it? How do they overcome historical precedent, a hostile media, a sceptical public and a nervous Party, and return Labour to power in 2015?

To my mind, it’s simple: the two Eds have to stop thinking of next year in terms of an election, and start thinking of it like one of those Gordon Brown Budgets they used to work on together.

I cannot recall one Labour policy announcement over the past year that performs those feats. Ed Miliband’s measures - rent controls or an energy price freeze - are usually populist enough but rarely stand up to scrutiny. Ed Balls’ announcements (such as his national infrastructure commission) usually pass the FT test but go entirely unnoticed in the pub.

Read more here:

Further Reading here:

'No clear idea' and a 'steaming pile of fudge': Ed Miliband under extraordinary attack from Gordon Brown's key aide who warns Labour election plan is 'totally dysfunctional' Daily Mail

Ed Miliband

·        Labour leader failing to communicate with voters, Damian McBride claims

·        Former spin doctor says Mr Miliband has no persuasive policies

·        Also attacked Labour's refusal to apologise for its record in office

·        Today's attack comes in updated version of McBride's tell-all memoirs

·        He was spin doctor for Gordon Brown but quit over a plot to smear Tories

  Ed Miliband’s ‘totally dysfunctional’ leadership tonight comes under extraordinary attack from former Labour spin doctor Damian McBride.

In an updated version of his sensational tell-all memoirs, Mr McBride warns Labour has ‘no clear idea’ of who it is trying to appeal to and a ‘great, steaming pile of fudge’ instead of key policies.

He says Mr Miliband, with whom he worked for years in the Treasury, has ‘managed to blend the worst of Tony Blair’s “me against the world” isolation with the worst of Gordon Brown’s “they’re out to get me” paranoia.’

In an apparent swipe at Ed Balls, another former ally, he says Labour has yet to persuade voters that ‘we’ve learnt our lesson’ by admitting where ‘the last government screwed up’.

The shadow Chancellor has resisted all advice to concede Labour’s mistakes during its 13 years in power.

Mr McBride concludes: ‘Labour currently has no clear idea who its target audience is, no positive messages to communicate to anyone about why they should vote for the party, no policies which will persuade them, and is being run in a totally dysfunctional way.’

Read more here:

'Most people are worse off under the Tories': Britons have experienced their biggest fall in earnings since 1874, claims Labour's Ed Balls

Labour revives plans for 15% death tax for estates of the deceased, provoking outcry from Tories who claim 'pensioners deserve better'