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Is the government still not thinking like a coalition? Last week, the Lib Dem Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, Vince Cable, proposed a Graduate Tax as an alternative means of funding higher education to tuition fees. This week, unattributed Tories briefed against it with the result that the proposal is now unlikely to prosper. Leaving aside the merits or otherwise of the tax, the process tells us a lot about how the government is working (or in…

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This Week after 10 minutes What do we think of Portillo’s prediction? In a lively discussion on BBC2’s “This Week” Michael Portillio made two very interesting predictions – first that EdM would be the next leader of the Labour party and second, that the two coalition parties would go into the next election campaigning under the banner of “The Coalition”. Unless the whole arrangement falls flat, which is always a possibility, we are talking about what could happen in 2015…

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See the blog of the Evening Standard’s Paul Waugh.

Does the focus on marginals miss the nature of electoral reform? There has been much discussion of the Lord Ashcroft commissioned poll, undertaken in the marginals by Populus, which seeks to examine what would have happened if 125 key marginals had used Alternative Vote (AV) instead of FPTP (First Past The Post) to elect their MP. The article on ConservativeHome can be found here, while analysis by Anthony Wells can be found here. Headline results suggest that the Tories would…

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Is this what Blair/Brown did? The announcement by George Osborne that he’s setting up the grandly titled “Office for Tax Simplification (OTS) sounds all well and good. The objective appears a good one and the announcement itself provides a further peg to have a go “at the last lot”. But isn’t the manner of today’s development straight out of the NuLab playbook? You identify a “good cause” and look as though you are trying to address it through the setting…

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Could the FPTP winner lose to the least unpopular? Just on the boat sailing back from Spain and we have internet access at last. Online again after more than 20 hours – how did I cope?? A key political moment when everybody returns from their holidays will be on the afternoon of Saturday September 25th when the results of Labour’s prolonged leadership contest are announced. This could be important not just for the opening of a new chapter in the…

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The May 2010 Circulation figures Newspaper May figures Year on change (%) The Sun 2,936,099 -1.61 Daily Mail 2,096,074 -3.86 Daily Mirror 1,238,145 -6.57 Daily Star 822,934 -2.11 Daily Express 663,627 -7.79 Daily Telegraph 698,456 -16.49 The Times 515,379 -12.82 Financial Times  399,862 -2.69 The Guardian 300,472 -10.47 The Independent 194,501 -4.85 Have we got out of the habit of paying for news?