The Nice Party Turns Nasty?

In her foreword to the Green Party manifesto, Caroline Lucas suggests that the Liberal Democrats have dumped their positive attitude towards government intervention, in favour of the view that ‘the state is a problem’. The ‘nice party’, she writes, ‘have just got nastier’.

Letters From Economists

"The tale of the 364 may simply illustrate that the backing of economists – though rhetorically useful for politicians – is not a reliable guide to good policy..."

Those following the on-going debate about how and when to reduce the deficit will have seen a letter printed in last Thursday’s Daily Telegraph. Signed by almost sixty academic economists, it is the second to back Labour’s plans to delay spending cuts until ‘the recovery is well underway’, and warned that Conservative plans to cut immediately could ‘imperil not only jobs but also the prospects for reducing the deficit’.

Cameron and the renewal of the 'property-owning democracy'

The Conservative Party has recently won considerable publicity by renewing a pledge to allow workers' co-operatives to own and run public services.In so doing, the party has been accused of 'stealing political clothes that will never fit them'. Co-operatives, it is alleged, are an intrinsically left-wing concept and will never be natural Conservative terrain - despite claims to the contrary by Jesse Norman, founder of the Conservative Co-operative Movement, and Phillip Blond, the 'Red Tory'.