Lord Ashcroft: Trident - The SNP shoots the messenger

By Lord Ashcroft KCMG PC

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The reaction to my poll last week on Scottish attitudes to Trident has been fascinating, and telling. It is an article of faith for the SNP-CND axis that Scots are overwhelmingly and passionately opposed to nuclear weapons. My survey showing that most Scots want a replacement for Trident when it comes to the end of its useful life, and that more are in favour of the UK’s nuclear submarines continuing to be based in Scotland than are opposed, has therefore caused a bit of a flap.

I was rather touched by the reaction of the CND spokesman who said (and I am not making this up) that my findings must be wrong because they did not match the views of people who went to their street stalls and public meetings. He also reminded us that the results contradict CND’s own recent poll, which found a large majority in favour of not buying new nuclear weapons, though their question omitted to mention that the existing system is due to be decommissioned.

But you know you’ve touched a raw nerve when you start being denounced in the official annals. On Friday a Nationalist MSP from Glasgow, Bill Kidd, introduced a motion at Holyrood proposing:

“That the Parliament looks critically at the results of a new poll on support for nuclear weapons in Scotland commissioned by Lord Ashcroft; believes that the result stating that 51% of Scots want the Trident nuclear deterrent to be replaced is misguidedly being used to suggest that a majority of Scots support keeping nuclear weapons in Scotland; understands that the results of this poll were intended to challenge the findings of a recent poll commissioned by the Scottish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament that showed a decisive 75% majority of the Scottish public is against both the cost and the reasoning behind the UK Government’s intention to keep all of its nuclear weapons stationed in Scotland; understands that, while Lord Ashcroft conducted the poll to supposedly show that "more than half of Scots are in favour of nuclear weapons", the poll showed that only 37% of Scots believe so in principle, compared with 48% who do not; questions the integrity of a poll that, it understands, was privately paid for by a wealthy Tory backer; considers that Lord Ashcroft is spinning the results, and believes that he should stop doing so and accept what it considers the fact proven time and again that Scots want rid of nuclear weapons.”

Lord Ashcroft: CND are not the best people to ask what Scots think of Trident

By Lord Ashcroft KCMG PC

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As I never tire of pointing out, it is always worth looking twice at any survey that seems to show that the public support the agenda of whoever commissioned it. Perhaps not at all surprisingly, a recent poll about nuclear weapons conducted in Scotland for CND is a case in point.

The poll, carried out in February, found 60 per cent of Scots saying they opposed “the UK Government buying a new nuclear weapons system to replace Trident”, with only 14 per cent in support. Quite a margin, which is at least partly explained by the preamble to the question, which was as follows: “The UK Government plans to replace the existing Trident nuclear weapons with a new system, at a cost of £65 billion”.

The main problem with this question is not the use of “UK Government”, which is at least factual, even if it was intended to serve as a kind of dog whistle to independence-minded respondents. And since for most people one multi-billion pound number sounds much like another, nor is the stated cost (even though it is something in the region of three times the true replacement figure: £65 billion includes the estimated running costs for thirty years, though CND evidently thought that pointing this out would complicate things too much).

Most importantly, CND omitted to mention (perhaps they thought it would have made the question too long) that the government plans to replace Trident because it is coming to the end of its useful life. As it was, the question allowed those polled to assume the government wanted to spend billions on new nukes just for the hell of it. Looked at in that light, the results are hardly remarkable. Even so, the numbers served CND’s purpose, and were duly seized upon by parts of the Scottish press, and the SNP, which declared the issue a huge opportunity for the independence campaign.

Lord Ashcroft: New moves on aid are a step in the right direction

By Lord Ashcroft KCMG PC

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If there was one clear message from the success of UKIP in last week’s local elections, it is that a significant slice of the electorate believe mainstream political parties are not on their side. As they struggle against the economic downturn, many feel ignored in the debates taking place among the political classes in Westminster. This is why many of our Party’s internal arguments are beside the point: the core task for the Tories is to show they are running the country competently in the interests of ordinary people.

There are flickerings of hope emerging in the party’s response to the rise of UKIP. One area where these signs can be detected is overseas aid. This has long been an issue that symbolises the gulf between Westminster and the rest of the country, with the three major parties united in their desire to spend more and more money on foreign aid to hit a spurious United Nations target. Yet as even left-wing think tanks admit, the public is becoming less supportive of maintaining, let alone increasing, current levels of aid spending - unsurprisingly, given self-evident failures abroad at a time of painful public spending cuts at home.

Lord Ashcroft: UKIP isn't a party of government. This helped them yesterday. It ought not to in 2015

By Lord Ashcroft KCMG PC

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Well, that could have been worse. A lot better too, certainly, but let’s keep things in perspective. The UKIP performance is by far the most striking feature of the local election results, and I will come to that, but there are other things to observe.

First, there is nothing remarkable about a governing party losing ground (though there is also no guarantee that it will be regained in time). The overall result, if not the precise losses, could have been predicted the day after the 2010 election. There is plenty of bad news but it is worth noting that holding onto Staffordshire, one of four counties we gained from Labour at the height of Gordon Brown’s unpopularity four years ago, was a real achievement.

Second, there is only so much these elections – or any elections that are not general elections – can tell us about what will happen when people come to choose a Westminster government and a Prime Minister. The YouGov poll completed on Wednesday found people expressing different voting intentions when asked about the local and general elections; the biggest difference between the two contests was in the share recorded for the Conservatives. The same was true in Eastleigh, where my poll on by-election day found large numbers of people saying they would vote differently, or consider doing so, at the next general election. Since councils set taxes and provide real services that people use, local elections do not matter as little to people as do some others, notably elections to the European Parliament (the next of which nearly everyone now expects UKIP to win). Even so, for many people they still present a chance to register their unhappiness with the way things are going – an opportunity which many have taken.

Lord Ashcroft: If things are so bad, why aren’t more people saying it’s time for change?

By Lord Ashcroft KCMG PC

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As campaigning for the local elections reaches its climax, one particular poll finding has caught my eye. A ComRes poll for the Independent, conducted last weekend, found 58 per cent of voters saying the government’s economic plan has failed, and so it will be time for a change of government in 2015. The Independent described this as a boost for Labour, but my reaction was different. “58 per cent”, I thought. “Is that all?”

The poll also found people all but evenly divided over whether, at the next election, the Conservatives “should be given the chance by voters of finishing the job of restoring Britain’s economic prospects” (44%) or not (46%). The wording of the question is quite friendly to the Tories, with the implied acceptance that the job of restoring economic prospects is underway, but even so: if this constitutes a boost for Labour, the narrowing polls must have made Ed Miliband’s party even gloomier than we thought.

In midterm, with the economy as it is, for only a bare majority to say it will soon be time for a change of government hardly suggests the Opposition is about to take the country by storm. Three months before the 2010 election, the proportion of voters saying it was time for change reached 82 per cent. As I concluded in Minority Verdict, the explanation for the election result lay in the chasm between this figure and the 37 per cent who ultimately voted Conservative.

One of the most important tasks for an Opposition is to show that the change people want and the change it is offering are the same thing. In today’s cynical age, and given the continued erosion of two-party dominance, this is hard enough even when the desire for change is overwhelming. If people are no more than lukewarm about even the need for change, the job is even tougher.

These figures only offer so much comfort to the Conservatives. Skewed constituency boundaries mean Labour need a much lower share of the vote to win than we do. The bulk of the Coalition’s cuts are still to come. And a single bad radio interview for Miliband only matters so much in the great scheme of things.

A Conservative majority looks a long way off. But if I were Ed, I would expect to be doing rather better by now. He is not regarded as a more credible candidate for Prime Minister, and his party continues to trail on the economy, the dominant issue of the day. We have a coalition government, and there is little clamour for change. The logic may depressing, but it’s inescapable.

Lord Ashcroft: The case against overseas aid - and for genuinely compassionate conservatism

By Lord Ashcroft KCMG PC

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99.3% of the UK Budget is not spent on Overseas Aid. So what is all the fuss about?’ This was the start to an attempt by Robert Halfon MP to defend the government’s determination to pump ever-larger sums into Britain’s over-inflated overseas aid budget. I think that it is extraordinary because it comes from a Conservative MP (and one for whom I have the greatest regard and respect) - but surely one of the things that unites the right is our desire to ensure all taxes taken from voters and businesses are spent as efficiently and effectively as possible. So unlike Labour, we don’t pretend a few billion here and there don’t really count.

Sadly, this cavalier approach to other people’s money typifies the aid industry. It is why billions and billions of pounds have been blown over recent decades, despite the lack of convincing hard evidence to prove these vast sums are doing the good deeds claimed by defendants. As the economist Peter Bauer said so famously, aid takes money from poor people in rich countries and gives it to rich people in poor countries.

Lord Ashcroft: 45 years on, do ethnic minorities remember "Rivers of Blood"?

by Lord Ashcroft KCMG PC

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Forty-five years ago this weekend, Enoch Powell warned of what he saw as the consequences of immigration. The “Rivers of Blood” anniversary is a good moment to ask how far Britain is regarded as a multicultural society. It is also an opportunity to look further at the attitudes of minority voters towards politics in general and the Conservative Party in particular.

In a poll of 1035 minority voters completed earlier this week, I found that nearly nine in ten think Britain has become a multicultural country, and a similar proportion saying this is a good thing. In a nationally representative poll conducted at the same time, 90% also said Britain was multicultural, but only 70% were in favour of this development. There was considerable variation between different kinds of people but in only one group – UKIP voters – did a majority (57%) say they were opposed to multiculturalism.

Three quarters of ethnic minority voters said that having people from a wide variety of backgrounds had strengthened British culture, though only just over half of the general population agreed. Just over half (54%) of the national sample thought immigration had been a bad thing for the country on the whole. 80% of black voters disagreed, but only 64% of those from an Asian background; only 51% of Sikhs thought immigration had generally been good for Britain.

Strikingly, most minority voters thought “the different ethnic groups that make up this country get on well”, while a majority of the general population thought “there is an increasing amount of tension” between them. Again, UKIP voters were the most likely to think this; indeed black and Asian people were twice as likely as UKIP voters to think relations between different ethnic groups were good.

A memo to Ed Miliband

By Lord Ashcroft KCMG PC

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Dear Ed,

It is evidently the season for offering you well-intentioned advice. Since I spend rather a lot of time finding out how the voters see things, I thought you might appreciate a view from the other side of the fence.

Most of the advice you have been getting is pretty good. David Blunkett is right that Labour must do more than articulate grievance. John Reid is right about the need to move beyond protest towards offering solutions. Tom Harris is right about the importance of showing you are the Labour Party, not the Benefits Party. Peter Mandelson is right that Labour should not try to duck the major structural challenges and choices facing Britain. Alan Milburn is right that people will soon want to know what Labour is for, not just what it is against. And above all, Tony Blair is right that Labour must move out of its “comfort zone” and offer leadership if it is to win.

Lord Ashcroft: 1992 - the last elected Conservative Government

by Lord Ashcroft KCMG PC

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The past week has been one of great loss for Britain. It has also contained an anniversary which has, not surprisingly, gone unremarked: it is now 21 years since the Conservative Party last won a general election with an overall majority.

Some will recall 9 April 1992 more clearly than most – not least the man who then headed the Conservative Research Department’s Political Section. Can that 25 year-old aide to John Major have imagined, that despite its fourth consecutive victory and 14 million votes (a total which remains a record), his party’s standing with the public would be reversed within a year – and that the next Conservative Prime Minister to enter Number 10 would be him?

It falls to David Cameron to emulate Major in leading the Tories to an unexpected victory. Two decades of shifting demographics and social attitudes challenge British Conservatives just as they do the Republicans in the United States. But it is worth reflecting on what the past can tell us – and I think Cameron can draw inspiration from the 1992 campaign he helped to create.

John Major had a number of advantages. One was that after only 16 months in office, people were willing to give him the chance to show what he could do (the same chance they would have given Gordon Brown in 2007). Another advantage was Neil Kinnock. Cameron can take no comfort from the first, but nor should he from the second: while many potential Labour voters find Ed Miliband unconvincing, they do not see him as a liability.

Lord Ashcroft: Farewell, Margaret Thatcher – a colossus of British politics and a dear friend

By Lord Ashcroft KCMG PC

I have numerous memories of Margaret Thatcher and all of them are fond ones. To me, she was not just a colossus of British politics but also a fiercely loyal friend when I was under fire. Her death today, aged 87, has saddened me greatly.

I credit Margaret Hilda Thatcher with rekindling my interest in politics after I had drifted away from it for well over a decade. I had admired her from afar long before I knew her – and not just because she was Britain’s first (and to date only) woman Prime Minister.

I thought that if a grammar school-educated grocer’s daughter from Grantham in Lincolnshire could make it to the top in the Conservative Party (she led the party in opposition for four years before becoming Prime Minister in 1979), then there had to be room for a wider variety of people.

Lord Ashcroft: Words matter. Don't choose them too carefully.

By Lord Ashcroft KCMG PC.

Nobody who listened to George Osborne’s Budget speech could have been in any doubt about what he was trying to say. If anyone missed the message about “aspiration” at the first mention, or the second, they would surely have picked it up by the sixteenth. Yawn! The aim of building an “aspiration nation” and helping “hard working people who want to get on in life” was reinforced days later by David Cameron in his immigration speech, in which he also found three opportunities to remind us that Britain was in a “global race”, a theme he first introduced at last year’s Conservative conference.

Consistency is vital. Almost nobody will have heard either speech, which is why it is a rule of politics that once you are sick of repeating a message people are just about beginning to hear it. But while I welcome the emergence of this theme, which I hope Cameron and Osborne will stick to and develop, I hope it does not herald the emergence of that tiresome political fixation, the search for “magic words” that will instantaneously transform sceptical swing voters into true believers.

Lord Ashcroft: End the ringfence for international aid

Lord Ashcroft KCMG PC.

The budget deficit remains the central fact of British politics. The deficit constrains everything the government does, or can plan to do. Restoring the country’s finances remains the coalition’s priority, and rightly so, but this is proving harder than it hoped or expected.

One reason for this is that while Conservatives favour public spending cuts in principle, they often oppose them in practice. Ministers are evidently fighting to protect their own territory. MPs and activists call for spending to fall faster, but to rise in their own favoured areas. Vested interests and lobby groups protest, but that is their job – just as it is the Chancellor’s job to make decisions.

None of those decisions is easy. But one is overdue, and has the unusual advantage of being both popular and helping the Chancellor achieve his fiscal goals. It is time to remove the ringfence around the International Development budget and end the commitment to spend 0.7 per cent of our gross national income on aid.

I don’t want to rehearse the overseas aid debate in detail. I have argued before that spending large sums of taxpayers’ money in this way is too often ineffective or even counterproductive, fuelling corruption and stagnating economic innovation in the countries we are trying to help. The 0.7 per cent target, proposed by campaigners half a century ago, is arbitrary and even bizarre: in what other areas of government do we start not by asking what we want to achieve, but how much of our national income we want to dispense?

Lord Ashcroft: ConservativeHome’s “Victory 2015” conference gives party activists an insight into the daunting task that lies ahead

By Lord Ashcroft KCMG PC.

If anyone arrived yesterday morning for ConservativeHome’s “Victory 2015” conference hoping to be told that the path to Tory success at the next general election is straightforward, they will have gone away disappointed last night.

If, however, they arrived hoping for an intelligent and constructive insight into the scale of the challenges that lie ahead and how we, as Tories, might address some of our current failings, then the chances are they left buoyed by the day’s proceedings.

In recent years, the ConservativeHome website has won a reputation for delivering exclusive revelations and unpalatable truths to the party faithful – and the sell-out conference that it hosted yesterday in Westminster was no exception.

The delegates had barely had time to get comfortable in their seats before I was giving them the results of my latest polling which took place in the marginal seats ie those that will decide the outcome of the next general election.

The results were not for the faint of heart: polling indicated that the Conservatives would lose no less that 93 seats to Labour in an election tomorrow, suggesting an 8 per cent swing to Labour in the Tories’ most vulnerable seats.

Lord Ashcroft: Ed Miliband doing less well in marginal seats than nationwide - but still firmly ahead

Lord Ashcroft KCMG, PC describes the findings of a new poll that he is launching at ConservativeHome's Victory 2015 Conference.

Marginal constituencies decide the outcome of elections. In 2010, though the Conservatives did not achieve the national vote share they wanted, the party’s targeting strategy meant it won 23 more Labour seats and 9 more Liberal Democrat seats than it would have done on a uniform swing. Had it not been for the Conservative performance in the marginals, Labour would have been the largest parliament and would have continued in government.

The voters in marginal seats receive, no doubt to their delight, a great deal more attention from the parties than anyone else. But not all marginal seats are the same. Not only are they contested by different parties, they are home to different kinds of people and face a variety of different circumstances. Not only can the state of play in the marginals look rather different from the national polls, different kinds of marginal seat can look rather different from each other.

Now that we are past the midway point in the parliament – and now that it’s clear that the constituency boundaries will not be changing before the next election – I decided it was time for a proper look at the marginal territory where it will be decided who enters 10 Downing Street on 8 May 2015 and whether or not they have an overall majority at their command. This study is based on over 19,000 online interviews in 213 constituencies throughout Great Britain – mainly those for which the Conservatives and Labour will be competing directly, and those the Liberal Democrats will be defending against either of the bigger parties.

Lord Ashcroft: Despite everything, there is still a strong sense that Lib Dems stand for fairness and ordinary people

Lord Ashcroft KCMG, PC.

The mood at the Liberal Democrat Spring Conference this weekend will perhaps be more cheerful than at any such gathering since the start of the coalition. The Eastleigh by-election apparently vindicates Nick Clegg’s approach to government, and his party’s approach to campaigning.

His activists will be relieved to think that pavement politics is back; that despite the polls, strong local government and an invincible leaflet-dropping network will see many or even most of their incumbent MPs safely back to Westminster in two years’ time. Certainly the Eastleigh victory was a considerable achievement for the Liberal Democrats, and there is no doubt, as my research has suggested for some time, that the party remains stronger as a local force that the national numbers suggest.

But that is not the whole story. A general election does not amount to hundreds of simultaneous by-elections, and the Liberal Democrats will not be able to treat it as though it does. Localness matters, but a general election decides who walks up Downing Street. Moreover, the party has ceased to be the automatic repository for protest votes, as it was in 2010 and before. Whatever the Lib Dems say in their scattered municipal bastions, they have to have a national story. Clegg must have something to say about the Liberal Democrats and government.