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The Conservatives could be pushed into third place at the European elections after the party’s poll ratings plunged in the wake of the Maria Miller expenses scandal. A poll has put the Tories on 23 percent, behind Labour (31 percent) and UKIP (28 percent) just days after the Culture Secretary was forced to resign in an expenses row. The Liberal Democrats were on a dismal 9 percent, according to analysis of recent polling by Professor Curtice of Strathclyde University. Levels of support for UKIP are now at a record high as they were the only party to gain popularity in...

Christians are the most persecuted religious group in the world, British Prime Minister David Cameron stated during his annual Easter reception at 10 Downing Street Wednesday. He urged Britain to play a leading role in standing against religious persecution and highlighted three focal points: The first is to expand the role of faith and faith organisations in our country. This has been a consistent theme of this government; I’m sure there’s more we could do to help make it easier for faith organisations…. Second thing is I hope we can do more to raise the profile of the persecution of...

David Cameron has claimed divine inspiration was at work when it came to drafting a key concept for Conservative Party policy. Speaking last night at his Easter reception in Downing Street, the Prime Minister reportedly said he was simply doing God’s work when he launched the “Big Society” initiative of volunteering and civic responsibility. “Jesus invented the Big Society 2,000 years ago,” Mr. Cameron said. “I just want to see more of it.” …

PM facing embarrassment over links between adviser and Islamist group. Adviser Tariq Ramadan is grandson of Muslim Brotherhood's founder . ... Tariq Ramadan is one of 14 members of the Foreign Office’s Advisory Group on Freedom of Religion or Belief, chaired by Tory peer Baroness Warsi. He is Professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies at Oxford University, and was a member of a taskforce set up by Tony Blair after 7/7. But Prof Ramadan, 51, is grandson of the Muslim Brotherhood’s founder Hassan al-Banna and his father Said Ramadan was a leading light. ... He was kept out of France in...

(Reuters) - Britain's economy could grow by 1.3 billion pounds if it left the European Union due to less regulation and more trade with emerging economies, a British diplomat who dreamt up a prize-winning blueprint for the country's EU exit said on Tuesday. Britain's free market Institute of Economic Affairs on Tuesday awarded a 100,000-euro prize to Iain Mansfield, a British diplomat based in the Philippines, who it decided had come up with the best blueprint for a 'Brexit,' a British departure from the EU. Amid widespread public disenchantment in Britain about the EU's perceived over-bearing role in everyday life...

The Tory revolt over Europe took a dramatic turn last night after senior Conservative David Davis called on the Government to open talks with Brussels on quitting the EU. Former Tory chairman Mr. Davis tore into David Cameron, accusing him of making a mess of his pledge to win back powers from the EU. “Scaremongers” who said Britain would collapse if it decided to go it alone were talking nonsense, said Mr Davis. Quitting the EU would be like a “revolution” and would boost UK jobs, wages, world power, arts and prestige, he added. Significantly, his intervention comes days after...

(Reuters) - Prime Minister David Cameron's handling of an expenses scandal engulfing one of his ministers has put him under pressure before European elections, threatening his Conservative party's already clouded electoral outlook. Cameron, whose party risks being beaten into third place in next month's European Parliament elections behind the anti-EU UK Independence party (UKIP), has stood by Maria Miller, Britain's minister for culture, since a parliamentary report ordered her to pay back wrongly claimed expenses last week. But the media and public backlash against Miller shows no sign of abating despite Cameron's efforts to end it. Many of his own...

The fragile Tory truce over Europe disintegrated last night after it emerged that more than 100 Conservative MPs and candidates are set to defy David Cameron at the General Election next year by vowing to leave the EU. The Prime Minister has promised the Tory manifesto will spell out his pledge for a referendum by 2017 on Britain’s links with Europe after trying to win back key powers from Brussels. But Tory rebels will go further and make their own personal manifesto vows to campaign to withdraw from the EU—regardless of any concessions by Brussels. …

David Cameron has ordered an investigation into the Muslim Brotherhood....to examine allegations that the M/B was behind the murder of three British tourists in Egypt in and that it planned extremist activities from Britain. Sir John Jenkins, the British ambassador to Saudi Arabia is to draw up a report on the group's "philosophy and values and alleged connections with extremism and violence". Cameron faces pressure to follow the example of Egypt and Saudi Arabia, which claim that London is the M/B's crucial centre for its activities. General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi played a leading role in the overthrow of Pres Morsi,...

World leaders played an interactive nuclear war game designed to test their responses to a terrorist atomic "dirty bomb" attack that threatened the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. David Cameron joined Barack Obama, Angela Merkel and Xi Jinping and other world leaders to play a "nukes on the loose" war game to see how they would cope with a terrorist nuclear attack. The German chancellor grumbled at being asked to play games and take tests with the Prime Minister, US and Chinese presidents around a table with dozens of heads of state at a nuclear summit in The...

Stupidity and ignorance rule the world. The trouble is that the stupid and the ignorant think that they are clever and well-informed. Take Mrs Hillary Clinton, next President of the United States and former chief of American foreign policy. She has directly compared Russia’s Vladimir Putin to Hitler. And she has compared events in Crimea to the Czech crisis of 1938. Dozens of other politicians and grandiose journalists are currently doing the same. It’s the one thing they think they know about history – that Britain’s pathetic Neville Chamberlain didn’t stand up to evil Adolf Hitler in 1938 at Munich...

... David Cameron, who once promised that if you voted blue you would go green, now appoints Owen Paterson, a man who is not just ignorant of environmental science but proud of his ignorance, as his environment secretary. George Osborne, who once promised that his Treasury would be "at the heart of this historic fight against climate change", now gives billions in tax concessions to the oil and gas industry, cuts the funds for onshore wind farms and strips the Green Investment Bank of the ability to borrow and lend All of which is a long way of saying that...

New mechanisms to limit eastern European migration and prevent benefit tourism are at the center of a seven-point plan laid out by David Cameron to reform Britain’s relationship with the EU. Writing in the Daily Telegraph on Sunday (16 March), the British Prime Minister said that the EU’s principle of free movement of labor and capital should mean “free movement to take up work, not free benefits”. He added that allowing new countries to join the EU should be accompanied by “new mechanisms in place to prevent vast migrations across the continent.” He also called for the removal of the...

Ahead of May’s European Parliament election, with issues such as the economy and immigration to the fore, none of Britain’s three main parties are stealing a march on their rivals. The co-governing, right-of-center Conservative Party, also known as the Tories, led by Prime Minister David Cameron, is struggling. What remains of its traditional support base, including some MPs, often seems opposed to the modernizing, socially-liberal direction of its leadership. […] But viewing the UK's party-political landscape solely in terms of the traditional duopoly (plus the Lib Dems) misses the big political story, and what is likely to be the major...

David Cameron should get his own country in order instead of complaining about plans for a United States of Europe, a senior Brussels bureaucrat said last night. European Commission Vice President Viviane Reding said politicians need to “work on the quality of education and welfare” in the UK rather than blaming EU rules for letting migrants come to Britain to seek work. She accused the Government of “distorting” the facts about Europe and condemned Tory talk of “opt-outs, renegotiation and referenda” for “holding back our Union as a whole.” In a speech in Cambridge, Mrs. Reding said she believed the...

As thousands of homes were left without power during the recent storms, engineers were diverted to fix a simple problem at David Cameron’s home. Two workmen were part of a team battling to restore electricity to 11,000 houses in Oxfordshire after storms and floods left families ­shivering in the dark. But they were suddenly diverted to the PM’s £2million family home after he lost his power while watching the Sound of Music on TV. George Faulkner and Alan Paton told BBC Radio 4 they were “diverted to a house in ­Chipping Norton” – which was later confirmed by their company...

The incalculable damage that mass immigration from the third world has inflicted upon the United Kingdom is a subject that we’ve explored at length on American Rattlesnake. Although the ritualistic murder and dismemberment of Drummer Lee Rigby is the most notorious recent illustration of how this phenomenon has adversely impacted native Britons, there are many, many more such tragic examples that bear scrutiny. The most tragic loss experienced by those living there, of course, is the forfeiture of the right to discuss this issue in an honest and frank manner. One need only point to those critics of Islam and...

The Conservatives can only win the next election if they do not use the language of “hate” and win back “aspirational” voters who turned to Labour under Tony Blair, a minister has suggested. Nicky Morgan, a Treasury minister, warned against spending too much time using negative language rather than sending out a “positive” message to the electorate. The Conservative Party can be seen as being focused on what it is against and risks “not talking about what we like and how we want to help people”, Miss Morgan indicated. Miss Morgan is considered to be a rising star in the...

David Cameron plans to strip welfare handouts from immigrants who cannot speak English. In a radical bid to slash Britain’s benefits bill, the Prime Minister intends to stop printing welfare paperwork in foreign languages and prevent claimants using taxpayer-funded translators at benefits offices. The move – which would also hit British residents who cannot speak English – was due to be announced tomorrow, but has been delayed following a row with Nick Clegg.

Britain told its European Union partners on Wednesday the EU’s treaties were “not fit for purpose” and there must be reform or it would quit the bloc. In the latest blast of euroskepticism from Conservatives in Britain’s coalition government, finance minister George Osborne said EU treaties had to be changed to protect member states like his own that don’t use the euro. The comments, made at a conference in London on reform of the 28-nation EU, are unlikely to be embraced by integrationists in Brussels, who want Britain to remain in the bloc but have become irritated by its demands...