Ed miliband

David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband are combining forces and heading to Scotland tomorrow to make the case for the UK. Here’s their joint statement: ‘There is a lot that divides us – but there’s one thing on which we agree passionately: the United Kingdom is better together. That’s why all of us are agreed the right place for us to be tomorrow is in Scotland, not at Prime Minister’s Questions in Westminster. We want to be listening and talking to voters about the huge choice they face. Our message to the Scottish people will be simple: “We want you to stay.”‘ The presence of the three party leaders

Ed Miliband would never have seen it coming, but he’s starting his first PMQs of the autumn term in a jolly good place. Labour MPs that I’ve spoken to over the past few days are now panicking not about how they can convince voters to back them but what on earth they’re actually going to do when they are in government. Naturally the Labour leader can attack on Douglas Carswell’s defection to Ukip, but there are two reasons why he might not want to make this his first question. The first is that he would surely want to contrast some of the serious things that Labour has been talking about

I don’t want to appear too immodest but, you know, I told you so. Back in February I wrote an article for this paper warning that Scotland’s independence referendum would be a damn close run thing. That was true then and it remains true now. Today’s YouGov poll reports that, once undecided voters have been removed from consideration, 47 percent of Scots intend to vote for independence while 53 percent will back the Unionist cause. If the odds remain against Alex Salmond it’s also the case that the price on independence is shortening. Paddy Power’s over/under calculation of a Yes vote now stands at 46.5 percent. A few weeks ago it was

David Cameron and the Tories’ electoral hopes are about to take a long walk on Clacton’s short pier. A poll in the Mail on Sunday today has Ukip on 64% and the Tories on 20%, a lead that suggests this contest is over before the writ has even been moved. So, Ukip are going to get their first MP. This means that the fracture on the right of British politics is a lot closer to becoming permanent, handing Labour the kind of inherent electoral advantage that the Tories enjoyed in the 1980s. This morning, the next election is Ed Miliband’s to lose. One of the striking things about the poll

Anyone who would rather not live in a Britain run by Ed Miliband and Ed Balls should be dismayed at Carswell’s defection to Ukip. He is an original, intelligent and eloquent MP who has done much to help the Prime Minister form the more radical parts of his agenda. For a while, I thought that this was his game plan: to avoid frontbench positions, and engage constructive opposition – which is democratic tugging of the party leader from the vantage point of the backbenches. I defended him against critics who said he was an attention-seeker whose ego would one day explode. Today, it’s harder to defend him. He was elected to a

David Cameron is back on holidays again, this time to Cornwall. He missed a trick. His economic recovery is making the pound strong and, ergo, the continent cheap for British holidaymakers. This also makes imports cheaper which has, in turn, cut UK inflation to 1.6 per cent in July – down from 1.9 per cent in June. This will be deeply annoying for Ed Miliband, as it interferes with his ‘cost of living crisis’ narrative. This had more potency when inflation was high (see the graph above) but it becomes that much harder to push the line now. Especially when inflation is expected to trot along near the target of

The money is moving. Boris Johnson is now the bookies’ favourite to become the next leader of the Conservative Party. According to Ladbrokes he’s at 9/4, with Theresa May and George Osborne trailing him at 4/1 and 5/1, respectively. Plainly, Boris reckons that David Cameron is on-course to lose the next election, or else he wouldn’t have made today’s annoucemnent. The turf accountants agree with him. They have Ed Miliband at 4/5 on to be the next Prime Minister, while BoJo stands at 5/1. Could it ever happen for BoJo, though? He’s 7/2 to make it to Number 10 ‘at any time’. Talking of bets, our own columnist Toby Young

So Ed Miliband is in trouble with some angry people over whether or not he took enough trouble over signing a remembrance wreath. Here is the offending wreath, on the right besides the Prime Minister’s which bears a personal message. Messages on the wreaths laid by David Cameron and Ed Miliband. #WW1Centenary #c4news pic.twitter.com/gDNMxvc2tQ — Ciaran Jenkins (@C4Ciaran) August 4, 2014   Mark Ferguson at LabourList reports Labour sources saying they were just handed the wreath at the very last minute, and had no chance to add a personal message. Nick Clegg’s wreath was similarly bland. Number 10 says it’s standard practice for the Prime Minister to sign his wreath

In this week’s Spectator, Melanie Phillips argued that supposedly anti-Israel protests over the Gaza war have convulsed Europe in the worst scenes of open Jew-hatred since the 1930s. The most appalling aspect is the silence in the face of all this of the political class. Here’s her suggestion for what Ed Miliband should say if he really cared about the rise of anti-semitism in Britain: ‘I am horrified, not just because of the resurgence of the madness from which my own family so grievously suffered in the Holocaust, but also because we on the left bear no small responsibility for this current obscenity. ‘Hamas has placed its rocket arsenals below hospitals,

Trade unions have an important role in any decent society, but their stranglehold on the Labour Party is something we must fight against. I will never forget walking the streets of Poland back in 1981, when martial law was in force, and there were armed soldiers on almost every street corner. There it was a trade union, Solidarity, which brought authoritarian Communism to its knees. In the UK Margaret Thatcher recognised the importance of trade unions in society. Indeed one of her first roles in politics was as chairman of Dartford Conservative Trade Unionists. But the battle in British politics today is nothing to do with the work done by

For a politician to draw attention to his own deficiencies is a desperate attempt to curry favour with the electorate that has been tried before with dismal consequences. The most famous case is that of the former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith who, at his 2002 party conference, addressed the problem of his dullness as a political performer by saying that no one should ‘underestimate the determination of a quiet man’. One result was that Labour backbenchers would raise a finger to their lips and say ‘shush’ whenever this croaky-voiced man was speaking in the House of Commons. He tried to sound tougher at the next year’s Conservative conference by

Mr S can only commend Boris Johnson’s column in the Telegraph today. It eviscerates Ed Miliband for his hypocrisy over ‘image’ and ‘substance’. As Boris puts it: ‘Ed Miliband is absolutely right to say that politics should be about ideas, and he is right to say that these should be more important than image. But the awful fact – confirmed by this speech – is that, frankly, Miliband’s image and photo-opportunities are the best things he has in his political programme.’ The rest is here.

Ed Miliband has suggested that there be a public version of Prime Minister’s Questions. This courageous idea makes Mr S want Miliband to be prime minister. What would you ask him?