According to @PoliticalPics, a political photographer who posts anonymously, those coming out of Tory HQ this morning looked a bit grim.
Tory HQ this morning it's just like the grim reaper had visited never seen so many miserable people ! 13 days to go pic.twitter.com/KcYNJ41lMY
— Political Pictures (@PoliticalPics) April 24, 2015
The Guardian’s City editor Jill Treanor has filed this first take on Douglas Flint’s speech this morning. Here’s the top line:
HSBC, Britain’s biggest bank, has issued a stark warning about the economic risk of the UK pulling out of the European Union as it revealed it was considering moving its headquarters out of London.
The surprise announcement of a “strategic review” into where the bank should base its operations will stun politicians on the general election campaign trail.
HSBC listed the economic uncertainty created by the risk of the UK going alone - a blow to the Conservatives which have pledged to hold an in out referendum on the EU.
Its shares jumped almost 4% after the statement, which was released ahead of the bank’s annual shareholder meeting in London. The rise added more than £4bn to the value of HSBC - already one of the most valuable companies on the London stock market.
The board - under fire following leaks of the tax avoidance strategies used in its Swiss arm - took the decision on Thursday night after returning from an informal meeting of investors in Hong Kong, its base until 1992. Shareholder after shareholder had asked whether London was the correct home for the bank.
Douglas Flint, the chairman said: “I said at our informal meeting in Hong Kong on Monday, we are beginning to see the final shape of regulation and of structural reform, including the requirement to ring fence in the UK. As part of the broader strategic review taking place, the Board has therefore now asked management to commence work to look at where the best place is for HSBC to be headquartered in this new environment.”
“The question is a complex one and it is too soon to say how long this will take or what the conclusion will be; but the work is underway,” said Flint.
You can read Jill’s full story here.
The HSBC story is not the first bit of bad news from business for the Conservatives today. The Financial Times (subscrition) is splashing on a story saying pro-Tory business leaders are unhappy with the party’s campaign.
Business leaders have become frustrated at the tactics and tone of the Conservative election campaign, amid concern in British boardrooms that Ed Miliband is mounting a stiffer challenge for Number 10 than expected.
Twenty FTSE 100 and other business leaders have told the Financial Times they are anxious that — despite presiding over an economic recovery — David Cameron has not opened a lead over Labour.
In particular, they criticise the strident personal attacks on the opposition and the flurry of big-spending promises that jar with the party’s prudent fiscal record. “The negative campaign has been disastrous,” said one company chairman.
FINANCIAL TIMES LEAD: Business jitters #tomorrowspaperstoday pic.twitter.com/J1W6tuqBsE
— Neil Henderson (@hendopolis) April 23, 2015
The HSBC announcement will, privately at least, be warmly welcomed by Labour. It reinforces what is easily their strongest argument for being said to be a pro-business argument.
Yesterday, in an interview and a media briefing operation, George Osborne claimed that international investors were worried about the prospect of a Labour government, particularly a minority Labour government dependent on the SNP. He was right to say to say the markets have their concerns, as these quotes show.
But he completely ignored the fact that investors are also deeply concerned about the prospect of the UK leaving the EU. For many of them, this is a much more serious threat than the prospect of corporation tax going up under Labour, or Ed Balls adopting a more relaxed approach to government borrowing. The HSBC statement has illustrated this vividly.
HSBC has announced that it is considering moving its HQ out of the UK - and at the same time it is worried about the possibility of Britain leaving the EU.
Here is an extract from a speech that Douglas Flint, the HSBC chairman, is giving today.
The board has therefore now asked management to commence work to look at where the best place is for HSBC to be headquartered in this new environment ...
As we look forward, it is impossible not to reflect on the very broad range of uncertainties and challenges to be addressed in 2015 and beyond. Many of these are outside our control, particularly against a backdrop of patchy economic recovery and limited monetary and fiscal policy ammunition. They include:
• unexpected outcomes arising from current geopolitical tensions;
• eurozone membership uncertainties;
• political changes, currency and commodity price realignments;
• and interest rate moves and the effectiveness of central banks’ unconventional policies.
to name but a few.
All could materially affect economic conditions and confidence around investment and consumption decisions.
One economic uncertainty stands out, that of continuing UK membership of the EU. In February we published a major research study which concluded that working to complete the Single Market in services and reforming the EU to make it more competitive were far less risky than going it alone, given the importance of EU markets to British trade.
And here is the story CCHQ seems to be trying to knock off the bulletins (see 9.20am) - Ed Miliband saying Labour would protect defence more than the Tories.
Here is the extract from his speech released by Labour.
I want to be absolutely clear that amongst the reasons we reject the extreme spending cuts that the Conservative party propose is that they would be truly catastrophic for the future of our armed forces.
The IFS set out yesterday that they would mean at least 18% budget reductions for departments like the Ministry of Defence - significantly more than the cuts it has had over the course of the last parliament. Conservative assurances to protect specific parts of the defence budget are meaningless in that world; they simply will not be delivered, they will be broken promises.
Labour simply will not take the extreme approach our opponents propose. I am not going to sacrifice the defence and security of our country on an ideological commitment to a significantly smaller state.
Indeed, we are now in an unprecedented situation going into this election. It is now the Labour party which is much better positioned to find the resources in the next parliament that our armed forces need to maintain the security of the United Kingdom and play our part in maintaining the security of the world.
My colleague Libby Brooks is with Nicola Sturgeon in Glagow, from where she has filed this report:
At a visit to a ceramics cafe in Glasgow’s southside, Nicola Sturgeon donned an apron and painted an SNP logo on a plate so expertly that one was left pondering whether she actually does all those badges herself.
The first minister and SNP leader described the plans for an English-only income tax as a “direct breach of the Smith commission”. (In fairness to Scottish Labour leader Jim Murphy, he spotted this line in the Tory manifesto last week and immediately denounced it as a “brutal betrayal” of Scotland).
Sturgeon said: “I’ve made it clear that where issues are genuinely English-only and have no impact on Scotland then I don’t think that Scottish MPs should vote. But the problem is that many issues are characterised as English-only when they are anything but; votes on the English health service for example, which have a direct knock-on effect in Scotland. In those cases it is not only legitimate for Scottish MPs to vote but essential.
“People across Scotland will be listening to what the prime minister is saying now and contrasting it with what he said in the referendum campaign, when he said that Scotland should not leave but lead the UK. Now according to David Cameron it is only acceptable for Scotland’s voice to be heard if we are saying what he wants us to say and voting how he wants us to vote.”
The campaign event was to confirm that SNP MPs will argue for extra support for carers across the UK, reiterating the manifesto pledge that carers’ allowance should be increased to the same level as jobseeker’s allowance.
Is the Miliband/Cameron migrant death row real or confected? Let’s have a look at the facts.
Yesterday Labour sent out their note about Ed Miliband’s speech. You can decide for yourself whether the three-paragraph passage about Libya, buried in the middle, amounted to a tasteless personal attack on the prime minister. (See 9.01am.) But, interestingly, most of the papers did not take this view. The Sun, the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph have a large number of journalists who are rather brilliant at identifying stories that can be construed in a way that reflects badly on Miliband. But, in the morning editions I’ve seen, they did not write up the “tasteless attack” story.
The Times has got a story on page two under the headline: “Miliband links migrant deaths to Cameron ‘failures’ in Libya.” Interesting, it was written by the Brussels correspondent and the defence editor, not lobby journalists.
When a politician make a big speech, the spin doctors like to ensure it generates more than one news story and, having released one overnight, Labour had another up its sleeve for 6am this morning. The Press Association put it out at 6am. Here is the top line.
In a bold bid to claim traditional Conservative territory in the general election battle, Ed Miliband will claim that Labour is now the party best placed to maintain the security of the UK, because of Tory plans for cuts which would “undermine” the armed forces.
In a speech to foreign policy think-tank Chatham House, the Labour leader will accuse David Cameron of pursuing a foreign policy of “small-minded isolationism” that has put party interest first and led to the “biggest loss of influence for our country in a generation”.
Citing figures from the independent Institute for Fiscal Studies suggesting that government departments including the Ministry of Defence would face deep cuts as part of Conservative deficit-reduction plans, Miliband will say Tories are set on “an ideological project to cut the size of the state” which would harm the security of the country.
I vaguely remember hearing something about this on the Today programme in the early 6/7am slot.
But then the Tory spin machine got to work. You can see the results in the tweets that Peter posted at 7.13am. And, for the next two hours or more, you did not hear much more about Labour promising to outspend the Tories on defence.
I’ll leave it up to you to decide whether or not you think there is a connection.
But we do know that the Tories have form for this. Remember how, within 24 hours of Labour announcing a popular policy to scrap non-dom status, Michael Fallon, the defence secretary, had generated a row by saying Miliband was unfit to be prime minister because he had stabbed his brother in the back? As Isabel Hardman pointed out at the time in a blog for Coffee House, this looked suspiciously like Lynton Crosby’s “dead cat” strategy?
It looks like soon CCHQ will be running out of dead cats. Larry is probably getting a bit nervous.
Over the past 24 hours four polls have been published. Two had the Conservatives ahead by four points. While the other two had Labour leading by two and three points respectively.
Although these figures may give the impression of a confusing picture, the differences and movements are minor and within a margin of error.
The Tories are slightly ahead in our average of polls (by 34% to 33%). However, in the race that matters most – seats, and who will have the numbers to form a government – the bigger picture remains fundamentally unchanged.
Our latest projection has the two main parties still virtually tied - the Conservatives are projected to win 273 seats, Labour 268. Behind them, the SNP is projected to win 55 of Scotland’s 59 seats and the Lib Dems 28.
If we look at these numbers as blocs of parties, as things stand, the arithmetic still favours Ed Miliband - and there is one less day to go.
Last night Labour sent out a briefing note about Ed Miliband’s foreign policy speech, embargoed until midnight. This is quite routine. Sometimes these advance notes contain only a brief taster of what is going to be said, two or three paragraphs, but sometimes they contain considerable detail. This one was about as extensive as they get. It ran to four pages (in small type).
The headline was: “Miliband: It’s time to reject the Tories’ small-minded isolationism that has led to the biggest loss of British influence in a generation.”
Somewhere about half way through, it includes this passage.
[Miliband] will say the refugee crisis and tragic scenes this week in the Mediterranean are in part a direct result of the failure of post conflict planning for Libya.
“In Libya, Labour supported military action to avoid the slaughter Qaddafi threatened in Benghazi. But since the action, the failure of post conflict planning has become obvious. David Cameron was wrong to assume that Libya’s political culture and institutions could be left to evolve and transform on their own.
“What we have seen in Libya is that when tensions over power and resource began to emerge, they simply reinforced deep seated ideological and ethnic fault lines in the country, meaning the hopes of the revolutionary uprisings quickly began to unravel. The tragedy is that this could have been anticipated. It should have been avoided. And Britain could have played its part in ensuring the international community stood by the people of Libya in practice rather than standing behind the unfounded hopes of potential progress only in principle.”
You can decide for yourself whether this amounts to saying Cameron was to blame for the migrant deaths in the Mediterranean.
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