Cameron to promote growth plans

Politics live blog - in Oldham East and Saddleworth
• It's the first proper byelection since the coalition was formed. There was a poll in Thirsk a few weeks after the General Election, but that was a "delayed election" caused by the death of a Candidate before May (and thus not technically a byelection) and it was a safe Tory seat where the result was a foregone conclusion. This will be very different. In England the thought of political parties being in coalition in government but fighting against each other at an election is still bewild...

Control orders are to be scrapped. About time too
Control orders are to be scrapped. Good. We don’t yet know what will replace them, and any combination of tagging, travel bans and the like will have to be closely scrutinised. But it now looks very likely that House Arrest will have no further place in our Democracy. The orders brought in by Labour represented the worst of both worlds. They were both an affront to liberty and an obstacle to justice. No suspect sitting at hime, cut off from all outside communication, is likely to provide...

David Cameron denies Oldham byelection pact claims
David Cameron visited Oldham East and Saddleworth today to dispel claims of a byelection pact with the Lib Dems. The prime minster urged voters to back the Conservative Candidate, barrister Kashif Ali. Photograph: WPA Pool/Getty Images David Cameron paid a flying visit to Oldham East and Saddleworth today to dispel suspicions that the Tories are pulling punches in the byelection campaign to help their Lib Dem coalition partners defeat Labour next Thursday - or at least to spare them a ...

Miliband accuses Osborne of misleading people over VAT rise
I would dearly love to know what this lightweight nonentity would do to reduce the £trillian Debt left to us by Brown? So wait...Torries Have lost popularity....Lib Dems have lost popularity....Labour have lost popularity....So who the hell do we vote for? Ohh ffs. Please get an intern to do some bsic number crunching. Single person earnin £17k take home, c £1000 per month. Rent & essential not vat rated goods £400 per month. Assuming the remainin £400 is spent on fu...

Ed Miliband accuses Tories of 'great deceit' in blaming Labour for deficit
Ed Miliband, speaking at Labour's campaign centre in Oldham yesterday. The Labour leader today attacked the Tories for 'rewriting history'. Photograph: Martin Rickett/PA Ed Miliband accuses the Conservatives today of a "great deceit" in blaming Labour for the national Deficit and warned that they have concocted a false narrative to justify politically driven cuts. In announcing a raft of swingeing public Spending Cuts the Coalition Government has repeatedly sought to portray that its hands a...

David Cameron, Top Gun: We were in the dangerzone
Every time I hear Mr Cameron using his favourite cliche about the economic situation he inherited from Labour, I have the same thought. Today, I’m trying to put music to the idea, with an early entry for the daftest political allegory of 2011… Turn the volume up and click here to see what I mean. “We were in the dangerzone,” Mr Cameron has just told a Cameron Direct event in Leicester, assuring his audience that he and his coalition co-pilots have flown the UK economy ...

Politics live blog - Wednesday 5 January
The latest poll results do not make very good reading for David Cameron or Nick Clegg. Photograph: WPA/Getty Images 8.38am: YouGov published its first poll of 2011 last night - and the results don't make very good reading for Nick Clegg, or David Cameron. The Liberal Democrat Ratings, and the government Approval Ratings, are as low as they have been at any point since the General Election. Here are the full GB figures. Parliament is not sitting today, and we're not expecting any big announce...

Ireland: Defence minister Fianna Failexodus ahead of election
Ireland's defence minister has said he will not stand in an upcoming parliamentary election, joining an exodus from the governing Fianna Fail party ahead of an expected record drubbing. Tony Killeen is the third senior minister in as many months to decide not to run in the General Election, expected to be held in late March, in which Fianna Fail's presence in the lower house could be halved, according to Opinion Polls. The party, ADVERTISEMENT which has dominated the republic's politics for mo...

Vat rise: Ed Miliband does well; George Osborne less so
Some thoughts on today’s jousting over the new Vat rate. Overall, I think Ed Miliband’s having a decent day and George Osborne isn’t. The Labour leader has started the new year with a bit of vim, grabbing some headlines by denouncing the Vat rise. That raises some questions for Labour, but they’re not as important as some people think. Has Labour got a credible alternative plan on tax and spending? No. But does that matter? Right now, not really, no. Assuming* the Coalition goes

Ed Miliband gets a kicking from the folks at home
The Jeremy Vine Show is not generally thought of as a bear pit. Politicians tend to regard it as rather cuddly - at least, by comparison to the forensic ferocity of the Today programme. So Ed Miliband must have been taken aback by the aggressive line of questioning that poured from the mouths of those usually benign Radio2 listeners who phoned in to interrogate him not only about his policies as Labour leader but about his character. At one point, he was even compelled to insist

Great news for England's schoolchildren: the number of Academies doubles under the Coalition
Congratulations to Michael Gove, the Secretary of State for Education. This morning we learn that the Coalition has started more Academies than the previous government in spite of being in office for less than a year. Two hundred and three were started under Labour, whereas the total now stands at 407. That means that nearly one in 10 state secondary schools in England are now Academies. By any measure, that’s an incredible achievement. Critics of the Academies programme like Fiona Milla...

Ed Balls: It's a mistake to play party politics on control orders
Ed Balls said it appeared keeping the coalition together was more important to Clegg and Cameron. Photograph: Lewis Whyld/PA The shadow Home Secretary, Ed Balls, today accused David Cameron and Nick Clegg of trying to stitch up a political deal on control orders that puts the political preservation of the coalition above the preservation of National Security. Balls's intervention comes as Clegg prepares to outline coalition thinking on Civil Liberties in a major Speech tomorrow. A decision o...

W.Va. Supreme Court to Hear Special Election Case
By Steven Allen Adams The West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals announced today they would hear oral arguments in regards to a case that could decide how soon a Special Election for Governor needs to occur. The court set a date of Tuesday Jan. 11, at 2 p.m. to hear the arguments - only a day before the 2011 general session of the West Virginia Legislature starts. In November the West Virginia Citizens Action Group filed a writ of mandamus against Senate President and Acting Gov. Earl Ray To...

Kitchen cabinets in politics: Can stand the heat
SURVEYS often find that even very senior politicians struggle to be recognised by an indifferent public. The advisers who serve them are even more anonymous. Toiling away in Westminster’s back rooms are aides whose influence comes without the burdens of public exposure. And at least for the handful of very senior advisers, that influence is considerable. All three Party Leaders now have a powerful right-hand man. Ed Miliband is a far punchier leader of the Labour Party than he was just a ...

For real growth, David Cameron must go much further
Telegraph View: Action speaks louder than words when it comes to the creation of new enterprises and jobs. ...

David Cameron is a pretty straight sort of guy but now he has to prove it
The Prime Minister working in the Cabinet room, 2010 (Photo: Andrew Parsons) I do not believe that David Cameron is venal. Unlike Tony Blair, Cameron has not used access to the machinery of power to facilitate the kind of covert exchange between Donor and politician that was such a feature of the Blair regime. There have been no distorted decisions on Public Policy as a reward for party donations, no marketisation of public honours, no business favours for foreign tycoons in return for politic...

David Cameron needs to do more to help business, sacked trade adviser warns
Lord Young of Graffham, the Prime Minister’s former enterprise adviser, has said David Cameron's scheme to encourage the unemployed to set up businesses will not be enough to return dynamism to Britain's economy....

Control orders set to split all three parties
Nick Clegg will give an indication in a Speech tomorrow of how the government is going to resolve the issue of whether to abolish, retain or replace control orders, introduced in 2005 to combat Terrorism, and a toxic subject entirely capable of splitting all three political parties. At one level the announcement will be a headline battle of spin. Has Clegg (against control orders) or the Home Secretary, Theresa May, (in favour of them) won? Have controls orders in any meaningful sense been ref...

Alan Johnson's limp attack on the VAT rise carries no conviction
Alan Johnson, the shadow chancellor, really doesn’t have his heart in the job, does he? His attack this morning on the Government’s lifting of VAT from 17.5 per cent to 20 per cent was pretty lame. “This is a broken promise - this was the big issue of the General Election campaign,” Johnson said. Really? The big issue of the campaign? I thought Labour’s destruction of the public finances and the consequent record-breaking Deficit was the big issue of the cam...

Ed Miliband mauled by radio listeners
Ed Miliband has conceded he has more to do as Labour leader after callers to a radio-phone-in told him he is underperforming....

Osborne: VAT hike here to stay
LONDON, Jan. 4 (UPI) -- Increasing the tax Britons pay for welfare benefits is more harmful than the hike in the value added tax, the chancellor of the exchequer said Tuesday. George Osborne told the BBC taxing consumption is more progressive than taxing earned income. "I didn't come into politics and become chancellor of the exchequer wanting to increase taxes. I'm actually someone who believes we want to try and lower taxes in this country," he said. "But when you've got a very large Budget de...

Making poverty permanent | Tom Clark
In a flimsy, 13-page document rushed out just before Christmas, the government quietly ditched the goal of ending financial Poverty for Children. It was an unceremonious end to an ambition which Tony Blair had once framed as New Labour's "historic aim", and which David Cameron's new-look Conservatives had made a great show of endorsing in the pages of this newspaper in 2006. Now Whitehall insists there is no need to amend the Child Poverty Act, which - with all-party support - enshri...

Dealing with suspected terrorists: Last orders?
When the coalition was being formed, the two parties made much of their common commitment “to reverse the substantial erosion of Civil Liberties under the Labour government”. High on the list were counter-terrorism laws, notably the control orders introduced in 2005 to restrict the liberty of Terrorist suspects who could be neither prosecuted nor deported. The other big target was the previous government’s extension of the time that suspects could be held without charge. In Jul...

Wilber, right?
Sean Braisted was shocked and awed to learn there is indeed a Democrat running for Diane Black’s old Senate seat: But in Senate District 18 there will be a General Election between the Democrat and Republican, and since all the potential Candidates dropped out to support Portland Mayor Ken Wilber, we have a candidate to support. The 18th Senate District was formerly held by Jo Ann Graves until she was narrowly defeated in 2004 by Diane Black. So there isn’t any reason to presume that...

UK moves to extend freedom of information laws
LONDON - Britain's government should release its secrets sooner, the country's deputy Prime Minister said Thursday, proposing reforms to strengthen the U.K.'s relatively new freedom of information law. Nick Clegg said he wanted to cut the time officials can keep records from the public down to 20 years from the current 30 years. He also said he hoped to expand the scope of law, which now covers U.K. government departments and local councils. Clegg said he wants it to cover more para-govern...