
Salmond ‘self-serving and selfish’ argues Miliband
Ed Miliband will today launch a highly personal attack on Alex Salmond by accusing the Scottish First Minister of practicing the kind of divisive politics pursued by Margaret Thatcher.

Ed Miliband will today launch a highly personal attack on Alex Salmond by accusing the Scottish First Minister of practicing the kind of divisive politics pursued by Margaret Thatcher.

Scottish Labour’s annual conference will this weekend consider calls for Holyrood to gain powers over all income tax in Scotland.

Amidst the pomp and the circumstance of Margaret Thatcher’s funeral today, across the nations the sight of her coffin, draped in the union jack, is doing little to quash the bitterness felt towards her tenure at Number 10.

A bitter war of words has broken out north of the border as Holyrood looks set to criticise Margaret Thatcher’s legacy in Scotland on the day of her funeral.

Just over a week since George Osborne declared as “unbelievable” the Welsh government’s opposition to many of his welfare reforms, the BBC has today unearthed evidence demonstrating the extent of the impact of the bedroom tax.

A House of Lords Committee has declared as “fanciful” any notion, as advocated by the SNP, that an independent Scotland could retain sterling whilst exerting influence over the Bank of England.

For Margaret Thatcher, Northern Ireland wasn’t just a political minefield but a personal tragedy.
Just months before she took office in 1979, her close friend and ally, the shadow Northern Ireland secretary Airey Neave, who led her campaign for the Conservative Party Leadership, was killed when a bomb, planted by republican terrorists, went off from under his car as he drove out of the Palace of Westminster.

In 2008, the Plaid Cymru AM Bethan Jenkns declared that plans for a portrait of Margaret Thatcher to hang in the Welsh Assembly was an “insult to the people of Wales”. At the same time, the then Conservative AM and now MP for the Vale of Galmorgan Alun Cairns praised the ex PM for having “transformed the Welsh economy.”

With just one MP still in Scotland, the effect of Margaret Thatcher’s reign continues to blight the Conservative party north of the border.

Whilst I disagree fundamentally with many of the government’s reforms to the NHS, a distraction and expense the health service does not need, there is one commitment I do support and one for which ministers must firmly be held to account.