Ed miliband

Is intellectual self-confidence a good thing? Ed Miliband was teased in parliament by David Cameron for claiming to possess it, and teased again by Lord Finkelstein in his notebook for The Times. 'I know he thinks he is extremely clever,' Cameron sneered at PMQs. Lord Finkelstein refers to a book that claims that intellectual self-confidence is a curse because it leads to wrong decisions.  I disagree. We argue in the leader of this week’s Spectator that Miliband is very confident about bad ideas, and Cameron lacks confidence in good ones. More's the pity. Cameron was being unfair: intellectual self-confidence does not mean thinking you're 'extremely clever'. It's about believing you have the right ideas, and being prepared to articulate and act on them.

What a funny, contradictory week it has been for Labour's campaign machine. First Ed Miliband told the Evening Standard that he had greater intellectual self-confidence than the Prime Minister - and won praise in the Spectator's leading article for being someone who does indeed have the courage of their political convictions these days. Then he seemed so confident of his policies that he chose to needle David Cameron with one of them at Prime Minister's Questions. But then he seemed to have a crisis of confidence and decided to produce a party-political broadcast that, er, didn't mention anything Labour is up to at all. When I blogged about this latest offering from Labour on Wednesday, I said it was an example of class war with wit and panache.

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_8_May_2014_v4.mp3" title="James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman look forward to the general election next year" startat=766] Listen [/audioplayer]In almost a decade as Conservative leader, David Cameron has tended to avoid talking about his political philosophy. He has presented himself as a pragmatist, suspicious of anything ending in ‘-ism’ — and the very opposite of a swivel-eyed ideologue. There is something to be said for this, but it raises the great question: what is a Conservative government for? There was no clear answer at the last election and so no clear result from that election. Voters had turned away from Labour, but were not quite sure how their lives would be better under the Conservatives.

One of the striking things about the next election is how what is going on at the macro level looks so different from what is happening at a micro level. On the macro front, things seem to be moving the Tories' way. The economy is growing at a good clip and that is set to continue until polling day and David Cameron has a considerable advantage on the question of who would make the best Prime Minister. But to return to the micro, it is easier to see seats where Labour might gain from the Tories rather than the other way round. Ask even the most optimistic Tories what constituencies they might win to give them a double-digit majority, and they come up short. The crucial question is whether these marginals are a lagging indicator or not.

How the Tory party will react if, as excepted, Ukip pushes the party into third place in the European elections is one of the most discussed topics in UK politics. But overlooked in all this is how Labour will react if Farage’s party beats them on May 22nd. If Ukip come top in the European Elections, as the polls indicate they have a very good chance of doing, Labour will be thrown into a panic. No opposition has ever triumphed at a general election having not won the previous European Elections. A failure in the European Elections would be a big blow to the idea that Ed Miliband is going to be the next Prime Minister. Already, influential members of the shadow Cabinet are grumbling about how the leadership hasn’t taken these elections seriously enough.

In recent weeks, I have found myself defending Ed Miliband as much as attacking him. I do believe that his election would be a calamity for Britain, but that doesn't mean I think he is an idiot pursuing a stupid strategy. On the contrary, I think what he is doing is bold, coherent, radical and chimes with the emerging populist mood. I also think that it is working – as things stand, he is on course to become the next Prime Minister. I look at this in my Telegraph column today. The rent control policy announced yesterday embodies this bold populism. Britain has a problem with buying houses – one created, in my view, by government policy to keep interest rates nailed to the floor during an economic boom.

Ed Miliband has got the reaction he wanted to his speech on the private rented sector, which he used today to launch Labour's local election campaign. Landlords and nasty right-wingers hate this latest stage in his 'cost-of-living contract'. The Residential Landlords Association said rent controls 'would critically undermine investment in new homes to rent and are not needed' and the National Landlords Association said 'the proposal for a three-year default tenancy is unnecessary, poorly thought-through and likely to be completely unworkable'. On Coffee House, Policy Exchange's Chris Walker says 'rent controls are at best misguided and at worst could be counterproductive, longer-term'. Grant Shapps suggested that these were 'Venezuelan-style rent controls'.

As the economy bounces back it keeps smacking Ed Miliband in the face. At PMQs today he tried to pose as the people’s champion fighting fat-cat capitalism. He started with Royal Mail, which is now worth a billion more than when it was floated. In hindsight, any privatisation can look like a Westminster mega-blunder or a Square Mile stitch-up. Miliband took the latter view. Referring to the clique of 16 ‘golden ticket’ investors, he asked why these lucky speculators had been allowed to flip their shares for an instant profit while the hard-working posties had been ordered to retain theirs for three years. Cameron spotted the trick. Posties got free shares. The City paid hard cash. The PM praised the flotation for turning a commercial dead-horse into a ripping triumph.

With apologies to John Rentoul, Can Ed Miliband save the Union? is a question to which the answer is God help us all. I admit to a blind spot vis a vis the Labour leader: Looks like Gussie Fink-Nottle, thinks like a Marxist Madeline Bassett. Clever enough in a droopy kind of way but, ultimately, a gawd-help-us kind of fellow. I wasn't very impressed last time Mr Miliband came to Scotland and so I wasn't inclined to be impressed by his most recent trip to Glasgow. Which is dandy because I wasn't. I dare say Miliband's belief that Scottish independence would be a bad idea - for Scotland and the rest of the United Kingdom - is sincere. That this belief is in his own narrow, strategic, sectarian interest is beside the point.

When Ed Miliband goes to Scotland and declares that ‘It is Labour that’s got to win this referendum’ it is a statement of political reality as much as it is braggadocio. The Tories have only one MP north of the border and the Liberal Democrats are the fourth party in the Scottish parliament. If this vote is to be won, Labour—as by far the largest Unionist party—will have to get the No camp over the line. Ed Miliband’s decision to take the entire shadow Cabinet to Glasgow last week was meant to show that UK Labour is now engaging fully in this battle. Miliband himself thinks that he has come up with an argument for the Union that is distinctly Labour.

At the start of the year, some of the air seemed to have gone out of the Ukip balloon. The party’s warnings about the scale of Romanian and Bulgarian immigration to Britain hadn’t been borne out by events. But the debates with Nick Clegg enabled Nigel Farage to get his momentum back. In those debates, Clegg was too passive in the first one and then over-compensated in the second with the result that he ended up losing both of them. Clegg’s decision to not engage with Farage in the first debate meant that he missed his best chance to get under the Ukip leader’s skin.

Labour's announcement on zero hours contracts today as the Shadow Cabinet visits Scotland is supposed to be a demonstration of how much better the UK can be by staying together. Ed Miliband's reasoning is that a border between Scotland and rUK would mean a 'race to the bottom' between the two countries, who would come under pressure from 'powerful interests' to 'worsen wages and conditions for everyone else'. It's part of Labour's 'positive case' for the union which the party wants to make today, and the reasoning does, if you're a Labour type, make sense. The only spanner in the works is the policy that he's announcing, which will hardly set the soul on fire if you're a Labour type who has been expounding on the evils of these contracts.

Dan Hodges' piece in this week's Spectator on the team around Ed Miliband is a must-read (and we've posted an even longer version online here). As he runs through those working with the Labour leader, a clear pattern emerges. There doesn't seem to be a Lynton Crosby equivalent working with Miliband. One of the many things that make Crosby so important to the Conservative party is his ability to swear at them and tell them they're doing something wrong. Miliband doesn't have a Crosby-esque character in that respect. Instead, all those around him seem keen to either demonstrate that they are the most loyal, in a Uriah Heep-esque display of servility, or to bolster Miliband confidence.