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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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