Ed miliband

Labour conference has now finished. Today was better than the others, but the delegates still struggled to show their enthusiasm when Ed Miliband reappeared on the stage this afternoon. Three people gave him a standing ovation. The mood at this conference really has been flat. At a fringe run by the Fabian Society last night, I was mildly perturbed as a Spectator journalist to be told by one member that I and other members of the panel were probably being too optimistic about the party’s prospects of getting into government. There have been a few notable moments when delegates seemed quite emotional, including during the powerful speech from 91-year old

Have you met Ed Miliband recently? Then he probably namechecked you in his speech earlier today. Unless you talked about the deficit or immigration, that is. Here’s the full list of people he met: 1. Josephine – a cleaner who hadn’t decided how she would vote in the Scottish independence referendum. I was on my way to a public meeting. I was late as politicians tend to be. And just outside the meeting I met a woman and I was supposed to be going into the meeting but I wanted to stop and ask her how she was voting. I did that to everybody on the street. One vote at

What’s Ed Miliband’s vision for the economy? We’ll get the public version of that vision in a short while when Ed Balls gives his speech to the Labour conference, but last night one of Ed Miliband’s closest advisers gave us a more interesting glimpse of the underpinning of the Labour leader’s economic plan. Stewart Wood, a former aide to Gordon Brown and now a key member of Miliband’s team, gave a fringe interview to ResPublica’s Philip Blond. The two men nattered with glasses of wine in their hands (which were at one point topped up by a CCHQ suffer embedded behind enemy lines) about Wood’s values. One answer in particular,

The Westminster party leaders have disagreed with much Alex Salmond has said recently. But it’s pretty difficult to fault the assessment of the aftermath of the referendum that he gave on today’s Sunday Politics. The First Minister said: ‘I am actually not surprised they are cavilling and reneging on commitments, I am only surprised by the speed at which they are doing it. They seem to be totally shameless in these matters. The Prime Minister wants to link change in Scotland to change in England. He wants to do that because he has difficulty in carrying his backbenchers on this and they are under pressure from UKIP. ‘The Labour leadership

There is a certain irony in the fact that Miliband is protecting his party’s Scottish advantage by accusing the Prime Minister of allowing ‘this moment to be used for narrow party political advantage’. Rejecting Cameron’s plans for English votes for English laws, Labour have rushed out plans for ‘a full Constitutional Convention rooted in our nations and regions, to address the need for further devolution in England and political reform of Westminster.’ Form an orderly queue. Labour happily admit that this carnival of constitutional tinkering could drag on for well over a year: ‘In the coming weeks Labour will set out how this should begin before the next election with

As I left Edinburgh this morning, en route to Inverness, I passed about four ‘yes’ activists cheerily wishing me good morning, asking if I have voted and would I like a ‘yes’ sticker if I had. It worked: on the way to Waverley, people were wearing the ‘yes’ stickers with nary a ‘no’ to be seen. If I were a ‘no’ voter heading for the polling station, I may wonder if I was actually on the wrong side of history. That a party was happening in one room, and I was heading to another – but that there was still time to change my mind. You have to hand it

While Westminster sent its own plea to Scottish voters, David Cameron and Ed Miliband were both making fine, impassioned speeches that both tried to scotch the SNP line that a ‘Yes’ vote was the only way to achieve a fairer Scotland. David Cameron had to address to specific – and quite beguiling – argument that this is Scotland’s chance to get rid of the Tories, that from independence onwards, it will never be governed by parties poorly represented within its borders. He did so by being a little attention-seeking: ‘I think the third thing that can come across in the remaining part of this campaign is the scale of the