The commentators                    23-10-14

...on British politics

The Tories can and should do more for business, including getting on with airport expansion and reducing the energy costs of manufacturing, but it can’t be a one-way street. If business wants to keep the party it prefers in power, it should accept its responsibilities to workers and accept a progressively higher minimum wage.
- Tim Montgomerie, The Times
What passes for the modern Left tends to be far too blasé about immigration. Perhaps those who reduce people’s worries and fears to mere bigotry should go back to first principles, and consider whether, in such laissez-faire conditions, free movement has been of most benefit to capital or labour. They might also think about the dread spectacle of people from upscale London postcodes passing judgment on people who experience large-scale migration as something real.
- John Harris, The Guardian
David Aaronovitch
if you hit the immigration section of Labour’s official website there is not a single word or passage celebrating immigrants, or their contribution, or contesting the common myths that persist about them. Not one. The message is intended to be unambiguous — we were soft and now we’re hard.
-  David Aaronovitch, The Times
Unlimited movement of people across national boundaries is one of the main reasons the EU exists at all. There really is nothing David can do about it - apart from pledge to leave the EU, of course. And he's too scared to do that. The Prime Minister pledged to reduce immigration. But it rises with every year that passes. He can do nothing about it. The only real answer now is that we have to get out.
- Rod Liddle, The Sun
No one who spent time in Scotland during the referendum campaign was in any doubt that they were witnessing something new. Partly, this sense of a generational break was magnified by the strength of pro-independence feeling on social media, all of which tended to reflect itself to itself with ever growing excitement. But the sense of a gathering generational rejection of past Scottish politics was palpable. And the defeat of independence seems barely to have slowed it. The sometimes malign incompetence of the victors may have fuelled it even more.
- Martin Kettle, The Guardian
Thursday 25 September Judges for the Editorial Intelligence comment awards announced their shortlists today, with ten nominations for the FT, nine for the Times, five for the Guardian, four for the Independent - and two for SubScribe. 
The Times and Sunday Times scored a clean sweep in nominations for the main award of commentariat of the year, which will be decided between David Aaronovitch, Camilla Cavendish, Daniel Finkelstein and last year's winner Caitlin Moran.
Guardian's Jay Rayner was shortlisted in the food writer category, but said that he did not wish to be considered as that award is sponsored by Tesco. 
The awards will be presented on November 25. 
See the full shortlists here
The Independent offered a Q&A, the Times expert analysis and comparison with services elsewhere. And both had charts, facts and figures. These were statistic-rich properties. That is not the way of the Mail. It aims directly at the heart, avoiding the head at all costs. With maximum use of  adjectives and minimum use of statistics, it tells us that Welsh health services are a mess - and this is, it seems, entirely a result of the fact that Labour has been in charge of them for 15 years. 
- Press review
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Editorial Intelligence
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