Election 2015: Nick Robinson, one man who’d welcome a second election

Boris weighs into Boots vs Miliband row

Posted at 16.47, Tues 3 Feb 2015

Boris Johnson has criticised Boots’ decision to move its headquarters from Britain to Switzerland in order to reduce its tax bill and said it was “disappointing” that the company’s boss, Stefan Pessina, did not “cough up for Britain” but chose instead to live in tax exile in Monaco.

But if the London mayor was in danger of coming over “a bit Ed Milibandish”, as The Guardian news blog put it, he quickly toughened up, saying that Pessina was "perfectly entitled" to express his worries about Labour’s economic policies, even so close to a general election.

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• Nigel Horne column: Miliband finds his scoring boots
• The Mole: does Miliband have public on his side?

Johnson’s comments, made on LBC Radio, brought this reaction from Labour’s business spokesman Chuka Umunna: “The mayor of London is right to set himself apart from the Prime Minister and make it clear he finds it disappointing when firms do not join the overwhelming majority of British businesses in making a fair contribution to the Exchequer.

“Rather than playing party politics on this issue, it would be welcome if the Prime Minister and Chancellor joined the mayor and us in presenting a united front on this issue.”

That was not exactly forthcoming. A spokesman for the PM said: “It is absolutely right that companies that enjoy the benefits of operating in the UK must pay their full and fair share of taxes on the profits that they make in the UK.” The coalition had addressed the issue with the ‘diverted profits tax’ announced in the Autumn Statement.

Asked about the decision of Smythson, the upmarket leather goods and stationery company that employs the PM’s wife Samantha, to move its tax residency to Luxembourg from London – as revealed by The Times this morning (see below) - the spokesman said: “I don’t comment on the tax affairs of individual companies.”

Sam Cam dragged into tax haven row

Posted at 09.32, Tues 3 Feb 2015

Smythson, the fancy-pants purveyor of snakeskin handbags and posh stationery where the Prime Minister’s wife, Samantha Cameron, works as a creative consultant, quietly “upped sticks” from the UK in 2010 to the tax haven comfort of Luxembourg, The Times reveals today.

The arrangement is “likely” to have helped the company avoid UK taxes, says the paper which adds: “The company is not accused of any wrongdoing — and there is no suggestion that Mrs Cameron has any involvement in the business’s tax affairs — but the news will nonetheless be an embarrassment to the Prime Minister, who has made clamping down on tax avoidance a feature of his premiership”.

Green MEP Molly Scott Cato, a frequent critic of tax avoiders, said the Smythson revelation “demonstrates yet again why [the government’s] rhetoric on tax avoidance is not matched with action”.

A spokesman for Smythson, owned by the “secretive” 84-year-old Frenchman Jacques Bahbout, declined to comment. As did Downing Street.

Read The Times article in full

Ed Miliband finds his scoring boots

Posted at 09.30, Tues 3 Feb 2015

Ed Miliband doesn’t always score his open goals, as the playwright David Hare wrote in The Guardian on Saturday. But the Labour leader found his scoring boots yesterday when he took on the Italian-born tax exile who claims that a Labour victory on 7 May would be a catastrophe for Britain.

“I’m not sure that Stefano Pessina, the boss of Boots the Chemists, would have been cowering in the nappy aisle after Ed Miliband’s counter-attack yesterday,” writes Nigel Horne, “but supporters of the Labour leader were at least pleased to see the Italian get a taste of his own medicine.”

That, of course, was before Stuart Rose, one-time M&S boss, launched his counter-counter-offensive with the help of the Daily Mail this morning, saying Pessina has every right to say what he thinks about Labour, tax exile though he may be. But as The Mole writes, Miliband feels he has the public on his side on this issue. And anyway, whatever happened to Cameron's threat that businesses that did not pay their fair share of tax in the UK needed "to wake up and smell the coffee"?

Read Nigel Horne’s column in full

Read The Mole's column in full

Lab-SNP coalition ‘most likely’ outcome

Posted at 09.30, Tues 3 Feb 2015

Based on current polling - with Labour still a couple of point ahead or on level-pegging with the Conservatives - a centre-left coalition of Labour and the Scottish Nationalists is the most realistic outcome of the general election, according to calculations from Deutsche Bank.

The Daily Telegraph reports that the Germnan investment bank is offering nine possible scenarios. A continuation of the current Conservative-Lib Dem coalition is down at seventh most probable. A Labour majority is placed at fifth most likely – and a Tory majority at eighth.

What would this mean to the bankers? Any government led by Ed Miliband “would likely carry out less spending cuttings than those laid out by the Tories, raising the possibility of an early interest rate rise from the Bank of England”, according to George Buckley, chief economist at Deutsche Bank.

Read the Daily Telegraph article in full

Or is minority government the answer?

Posted at 09.30, Tues 3 Feb 2015

Minority government is alien to the British system in the minds of most politicians, writes Don Brind. But the head of of the think tank IPPR, Nick Pearce, argues in today’s FT that there are lessons for modern politicians in the general election of 1910.

Liberal leader Herbert Asquith lost his governing majority that year but went on to lead “perhaps the most successful minority government in modern British history” which among other things “laid the foundations for the modern welfare state”.

What Asquith proved was that a minority government can accomplish much more than many modern politicians realise — “but only if they are prepared to venture further from their usual ideological habitats” and form “broad alliances”.

Read Don Brind’s column in full

Labour battle bus hunts PM's 'mummies'

Posted at 14.12, Mon 2 Feb 2015

Labour is to relaunch the campaign battle bus last seen in 2005 – and this time it will be used by deputy leader Harriet Harman and women and equalities spokesperson Gloria De Piero to reach out to women voters.

They have discovered that the last general election campaign, dominated by men thanks partly to the high-profile TV leader debates, was a turn-off for women. “The number of women who didn’t vote in 2010 was 1.1 million higher than the number of men who didn’t.”

Even more of a problem is what the coalition has done – or not done – for women since, writes The Guardian columnist Suzanne Moore this afternoon.

Moore quotes research by the Fawcett Society showing that 74 per cent of the £22 billion of austerity “savings” have come out of women’s pockets in the name of public spending cuts. “Women are now the majority of low-paid workers,” she writes. “The gender pay gap has actually increased.”

Little wonder that a TNS poll for Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour finds that 48 per cent of women feel that none of the current party leaders understands what life is like for them and their families.

Or that a Populus poll for this morning’s FT shows that David Cameron has a “mummy problem”: only 28 per cent of mothers with children under 18 plan to vote Conservative, against 48 per cent for Labour.

Moore concludes: “Economic policies, while presented as gender-neutral, have been an attack on even basic notions of equality.”

Read Suzanne Moore’s column in full

Labour hit back at 'tax exile' Boots boss

Posted at 09.20, Mon 2 Feb 2015

Labour figures have launched a counter-attack on the Italian-born billionaire boss of Boots the Chemists, Stefano Pessina, who told the Sunday Telegraph that a Labour victory on 7 May would be a “catastrophe” for British business.

They point out that Pessina, who at the age of 74 has amassed a fortune estimated at £7.5 billion, lives in Monte Carlo and, despite running a company with 2,500 shops and 70,000 employees in Britain, does not pay tax in the UK.

Furthermore, Boots – or Walgreens Alliance Boots as it’s now called following various mergers - has been targeted by campaigners more than once over its tax status, The Guardian reports.

• Sunday newspapers give Ed Miliband a 'hellish' day

Chuka Umunna, shadow business secretary, said: “The British people and British businesses will draw their own conclusions when those who don’t live here, don’t pay tax in this country and lead firms that reportedly avoid making a fair contribution in what they pay, purport to know what is in Britain’s best interests.”

Among Labour MPs and election candidates who hit the social networks was Kevin McKeever, standing for Northampton South, who tweeted: “No wonder Monaco-based boss of Boots UK is worried about an Ed Miliband victory. Company paid just £64m tax on £22.4 billion sales!”

Pessina never said in his Sunday Telegraph interview what specific Labour policies he disliked. It was inferred that he was attacking the party’s pledge to take the top tax band back up to 50p in the £, as well as such policies as an energy price freeze and a mansion tax.

Read The Guardian report in full

Labour donor rubbishes Mail story

Posted at 09.20, Mon 2 Feb 2015

Another Sunday newspaper story “rubbished” by the end of the day was the Mail on Sunday report that John Mills, the party’s biggest private donor, had apparently attacked two of Ed Miliband’s key election policies - reducing private sector involvement in healthcare and introducing a mansion tax.

Mills’s comments were presented by the Mail on Sunday under the headline: ‘Labour knives out for loser Red Ed: Election panic grips party as big guns turn on haunted Miliband’.

But Mills dismissed the story as “pure mischief-making". He told Labour List: “I am well aware of the vulnerableness of my position to being used to provide highly selective and misleading quotes… but unfortunately there is a limit to the extent to which this sort of thing can be avoided, however hard I try.”

Read Labour List’s report in full

David Cameron has a ‘mummy problem’

Posted at 09.20, Mon 2 Feb 2015

David Cameron will turn the election focus off the economy and on to education today, with a promise that any primary and secondary schools rated by Ofsted as “requiring improvement” will be forced to become academies. Currently only schools categorised as “inadequate” face this sanction.

But will it impress Britain’s mothers? A new Populus poll suggests David Cameron has a “mummy problem”, as the Financial Times puts it: only 28 per cent of mothers with children under 18 plan to vote Conservative, compared to 48 per cent for Labour.

As The Mole writes, Cameron is acutely aware he has a “mummy problem”. That is why he replaced former Education Secretary Michael Gove with mother-of-one Nicky Morgan after it was shown that Gove was “toxic” with school run mums. Yet on academies and the Three Rs, Cameron is still following the Gove path.

Read The Mole's column in full

Labour ‘won’t bow to SNP on Trident’

Posted at 09.20, Mon 2 Feb 2015

Labour will not support the scrapping of the Trident nuclear deterrent in order to form a coalition with the Scots Nationalists, Ed Miliband’s campaign chief, Douglas Alexander, said yesterday. “It’s the responsibility of a Labour government to keep this country safe.”

Alexander did not categorically rule out an election pact of some sort with the SNP. But abandoning the replacement of the nuclear deterrent would not be up for negotiation, he insisted, and nor would SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon’s other demand – that Scotland be given full fiscal autonomy.

As Don Brind writes, Alexander issued his tough line just as an Electoral Calculus projection was released showing that – based on current polling - a Labour-SNP pairing is the only combination of parties likely to achieve a Commons majority.

Read Don Brind’s column in full

'No anti-Cameron billboards’ for Labour

Posted at 09.20, Mon 2 Feb 2015

Labour will not run any billboard posters showing cheeky images of David Cameron during the election campaign, The Observer reports. The pledge comes after the Tories released a poster showing a photoshopped Ed Miliband with his arm around Alex Salmond under the line : ‘Your worst nightmare … just got worse’.

Labour campaign chief Douglas Alexander said Labour wants to avoid “negative personalised adverts” and to raise the tone of debate. But as The Observer reports, the decision to “occupy the moral high ground” has also been driven by financial necessity.

Buying billboard space is highly expensive and while the Tories can afford it, Labour cannot. The party expects to be out-spent by a factor of 3-1 by the Conservatives, who have a war chest of nearly £80 million.

Read The Observer report in full