Friday, 26 May 2017

The "Cranking it all back up" election - day 38



After two painful days, proper campaigning struggled to get back underway.  UKIP's manifesto was launched on Thursday and national campaigning activity was scheduled by other parties to start again on Friday.

It was probably left to lower party ranks to inform the other sides of campaign intentions this time, with no further mention of the kind of middle-of-the-night phone call in which May and Corbyn were reported to have agreed the pause.  I'd love to know how that call went after the poisonous things she'd been calling him on Monday (and how cynically relieved she was to have the nation distracted from her poor performance with Andrew Neil).

Did the campaign ever really stop? 

Donations have been coming in, as the Electoral Commission report each week.  We'll see next week whether the Manchester tragedy and campaigning pause had any effect.


Tim Farron replaced Thursday's planned Lib Dem party political broadcast with a personal message after the killings in Manchester - his “capital city” as he put it, where he had spent "many nights of his teenage years".

The main campaigning-that-wasn't-campaigning saw Theresa May continuing to do her job as prime minister.  Her addresses to the nation, convening the famous COBRA committee, calling for a national minute's silence showed her doing the big, important things while everybody else had to watch.

She flew to Brussels for NATO and EU events knowing that Trump would be on her side on most things (which he turned out to be, except for one point - see below):

"[The Manchester attack] I think, shows why it is important for the international community including Nato to do more in our fight against terrorism and that is what I am going to be pushing for today.

"I am also going to be pushing the UK’s agenda on burden-sharing and we are proud, as the UK, that we meet the target of spending 2% of our GDP on defence and 20% of our defence budget on equipment.

"And other nations must be prepared to take responsibility and that includes more investment in defence."

She also confirmed that she would be telling President Trump that intelligence shared with the US must be shared securely:

"On the issue of the intelligence-sharing with the USA, we have a special relationship with the USA, it is our deepest defence and security partnership that we have.

"Of course, that partnership is built on trust. And part of that trust is knowing that intelligence can be shared confidently and I will be making clear to President Trump today that intelligence that is shared between law enforcement agencies must be shared securely."

And, behind the scenes, researchers for parties, charities and academic bodies carried on poring over the manifestos.  Thursday saw discussion of the Tories' free school breakfasts which had been in and out of the news for several days.  May & co have decided that the "fair funding formula" they would have been introducing if an election hadn't got in the way was not quite right (as in, it akes money away from schools in Tory-held constituencies).

The chosen solution was to find some money to protect those schools which would be likely to suffer budget cuts, while other schools still receive more money.  Having done this once, I suspect they would come under pressure next year to protect the best funded schools again and lift the others up a bit more - levelling up to the level of the highest funded.  Which is not what they had intended.

And where would this money come from?  Abolishing Nick Clegg's scheme to give every child in the first three years of primary school a free hot lunch regardless of their parents' incomes might yield about the right amount.  (It might also annoy some school managers who had to bust guts a couple of years ago to upgrade their catering facilities.)

But snatching food from the mouths of poor little children doesn't look good, so along came the breakfasts.  In a remarkable echo of a few other unfunded/badly explained policies recently, it appeared that each breakfast could cost no more than 6.8p, and that staffing had not been allowed for.

Figures from Education Datalab suggested that no scheme with a better-than-derisory take-up could be delivered for the suggested £60 million a year.


   
As the Independent reported, "backtracking on previous statements made, the party is now refusing to confirm the correct amount set out in the plans".

UKIP "resuming hostilities"

UKIP didn't use that phrase;  usually supportive news provocateur Guido Fawkes chose it. With friends like that...  And one of the MEPs that UKIP didn't manage to keep hold of (questions of expenses irregularities) appeared to have a topical suggestion.





Paul Nuttall launched the party manifesto in London - none of the targeted seat visits that other parties had opted for (the Scots Nats are reported to be moving their delayed launch from Edinburgh to the seat of Pete Wishart (SNP, Perth and North Perthshire, majority 9,641) which the Tories have their eyes on).

The theme of the day was UKIP's claim to be the only party "brave enough" to tackle Islamic terrorism, with thousands of extra police, troops, prison and border guards.  Nuttall "refused to rule out" interning terrorism suspects without trial and proposed that anyone found to have fought for Islamic State overseas should forfeit their citizenship and not be allowed to return (not that the country such a person was dumped in would necessarily be forced to go along with that, under international law).


Nuttall remembered to stress that "the vast majority of the Muslim population of this country are peaceful people and a great asset to our society" (I believe the same can be said about Mexicans) but had nothing to say about his senior MEP Gerard Batten's argument that all Islam is barbaric and primitive.

The robust approach to integration proposed at their April event, the one which led Arron Banks to label parts of the policy a "war on Muslim religion" and James Carver MEP to resign as a spokesperson, was refined but still posed hard questions (on sharia, which May has been "consulting on", and FGM, a continuing, scandalous embarrassment, for example) which I feel UKIP are unqualified by attitude to answer.

On the ban on (certain) face coverings Nuttall claimed that a "burqa ban" had "worked" in France and Belgium.  "Worked" in what way?  Has it somehow improved integration or worked against terrorism, or has it just successfully reduced the number of women seen in the wrong clothes?  He also quoted with approval Manfred Weber MEP's proposal of an EU-wide burqa ban (but not, strangely, Weber's recognition that such a thing is not within the EU's competence).


Elsewhere in the manifesto are a proposal to reallocate most of the overseas aid budget to health and social care, and abolishing the House of Lords and "replace it" with an English parliament.  This would leave four nations running themselves and a UK-level house of some sort which would leave government with even more untrammelled power than at present.  The manifesto seems more concerned with detailing electoral systems at each level than how to deal with the royal prerogative and how to ensure the quality of law.

One item which people really wanted to be a part of the manifesto (but, I promise, I haven't been able to find it) was





Both Nuttall and manifesto author Suzanne Evans told us that Theresa May must take some responsibility for the Manchester bombing, but later denied they meant personal responsibility.  It was her "record as home secretary" they were criticising.  Pardon me, but that's one person's record, which she often relies on to demonstrate her experience.  I'd go with the criticism on police cuts and not on other things, but UKIP seem not to be "brave enough" to make it personal.

Saboteurs department


Amber Rudd was "irritated" with the US:





or "furious":





In the current atmosphere the idea of using security cooperation as a Brexit bargaining chip might "lack credibility" and it doesn't look like a good time to be talking about post-election Tory reshuffles:





Amber Rudd thought it was good that the net immigration figure was down, but the Institute of Directors wasn't convinced:

"Today’s migration figures underline the importance of immigration to the UK workforce and are a warning of the damage a significant reduction could do. Alarmingly, the fall in net migration is being driven as much by people leaving as by fewer arriving. This is a big worry for employers who risk losing key members of staff in positions that cannot easily be replaced from the home-grown pool available. The IoD has repeatedly called for the government to guarantee the status of EU migrants already living here. Doing so would allow businesses to start planning for the future.

"There is a well expressed public desire for increased control of immigration but all parties in the general election should set out clearly the costs of any proposals they make. The Office for Budget Responsibility have calculated that cutting immigration to the “tens of thousands” would add £6bn a year to the national deficit, just in terms of the direct reduction in the taxes collected and so not including wider economic impacts."

And, as May looked to the US president for support in furrin parts...  Trump's Team Told EU Leaders They're Worried Brexit Could Cost US Jobs.
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