In an email to Wilmott, Leslie wrote: “Many thanks for this Paul … I think you make some good points about the best way to introduce an FTT… I’ll have a good think about some of these good points ahead of our manifesto but I appreciate any updates you might have along the way.”
Wilmott also met Nick Clegg after being introduced by Lord Paul Strasburger.
During a discussion between all three, the peer said to the Liberal Democrat leader: “Paul [Wilmott] is trying to find a way to support us without sticking his head too far above the parapet and we’re working out how to involve his family in making donations.”
In response, Clegg said: “A very useful thing as well, it’s not a financial year calendar, it’s an end of year calendar, so you can do things either side.”
Wilmott had told Strasburger that he was thinking of donating £50,000 but would rather his name not be linked to the donation. Strasburger suggested that it was “perfectly legal” for Wilmott to uses his wife or stepfather.
The peer resigned the party whip on Friday night, vowed to clear his name and said he had been entrapped by the programme makers. As holder of the ancient post of lord chancellor, responsible for courts and judges across the land, Derry Irvine had a knack for shutting down irritating interventions from his colleagues. During his time in office, from 1997 to 2003, Irvine’s fearsome reputation preceded him. Minor functionaries and even cabinet ministers would cower when the lord chancellor, who once compared himself to his 16th-century predecessor Cardinal Wolsey, felt they had not mastered their briefs.
Tony Blair might have thought that as the nation’s leader he would escape a lashing from Irvine. But “Young Blair” – Irvine’s name for the prime minister, dating back to 1976, when Irvine gave him his first professional opening as a pupil barrister – was briefly silenced during a fraught meeting early in Labour’s second term in which a worrying rise in the number of asylum cases was being discussed.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/24/immigration-debate
The gravest offence, in Lord Irvine’s eyes, was to call into question Britain’s solemn commitments on human rights, notably those made after the second world war in the European convention on human rights (ECHR). When ministers dared to broach the issue of drawing back from some aspects of the ECHR as a way of curbing asylum applications, Irvine’s response was sharp. “I don’t know why you guys don’t just adopt the Zimbabwean constitution and have done with it,” he told Blair and the home secretary, David Blunkett. The discussion was brought to a swift conclusion when Lord Goldsmith, the attorney general, pointed out that Britain would be in breach of its EU membership terms if it sought to wriggle out of its responsibilities under the separate ECHR. New Labour would have to find another solution to its immigration problem.
As today’s generation of political leaders prepares to fight an election that is in part a contest about the mistakes, judgments and assumptions Labour made in government on immigration, it is easy to forget just how much immigration and asylum haunted Downing Street throughout New Labour’s time in office. Between 1997 and 2010, net annual immigration quadrupled, and the UK population was boosted by more than 2.2 million immigrants, more than twice the population of Birmingham. In Labour’s last term in government, 2005-2010, net migration reached on average 247,000 a year.
The dramatic changes have left British politics ruptured. Immigration remains the No 1 issue on the doorstep, according to pollsters – a stream that feeds into the well of mistrust in politics. It has spawned the emergence of Ukip and helped create four- or five-party politics in the UK for the first time.
Despite the Conservative party’s recent travails over its broken pledge to bring net migration down to the low tens of thousands, the issue has been a special bind for Labour. In the wake of the party’s defeat in the 2010 election, there was a brief mass mea culpa about immigration, but even now Labour struggles to explain to a core part of its electorate the decisions that were taken on its watch.
“Whatever Channel 4 may say in their Dispatches programme, I do not think I have committed any offence,” he said in a statement. “Having said that, I believe that we should all be accountable for what we do, so I have invited the Electoral Commission to carry out an investigation into my actions,” he added.
According to electoral law, a party must identify donors if they give a political party more than £7500 in a calendar year. The party must provide the donor’s name to the Electoral Commission which discloses it in a public register. It is a breach of of the law if there is an attempt to deceive who the donation has come from.
The seven-way debate is the only one in which David Cameron and Ed Miliband will share a stage after the conservative party refused broadcaster proposals for at least three debates to include both main party leaders.
Broadcasters confirmed on Saturday the new debate structure, which will start with Miliband and Cameron interviewed separately by Jeremy Paxman on Sky and Channel 4 this Thursday, followed by the seven-way debate a week later.
There will also be a debate featuring the five opposition parties outside of the coalition and a Question Time-style show presented by David Dimbleby in which Miliband, Cameron and Nick Clegg will answer questions from a studio audience.
Ethchingham also told the Radio Times she believes the BBC’s children’s current affairs show Newsround, where she got her break in the mid-90s, was “an incredibly important programme for the BBC to make”. There is one thing uniting the restless voters of the British Isles ahead of the general election: 77% are dissatisfied with the state of UK democracy, according to research published by the University of Edinburgh this week, and there is little variation between the different parts of the country. But that is where the political similarities between Scotland and the rest of the country end.
When the people of Scotland voted decisively against independence in September 2014 many thought questions about secession would be put to rest for a generation. But since that day, membership of the SNP has risen four-fold to around 100,000 – about one in 50 adults in Scotland are now members of the party. These are mass membership levels not seen in Britain since the 1950s.
However, it would be simplistic to reduce what is happening in Scotland today to a debate in favour of, or against, independence. Last year’s referendum was instead the catalyst for a far deeper ideological and generational shift.