Ed miliband

Talking about energy bills week in, week out might be good politics for both parties, but it sure does make for a grumpy PMQs session. David Cameron was still rather ratty this week, but he managed some better attacks on Miliband than he's done in the past few weeks of the great energy debate. He tried to pin the blame for the current state of the energy market on Miliband, saying: 'Who gave us the Big Six? Yes, when Labour first looked at this, there were almost 20, but because of his stewardship we've ended up with six players.' He also accused the party of pushing for yet more price rises now, with the Lords vote that Robert Halfon wrote about for us yesterday.

Yesterday – in a crunch vote in the House of Lords – Labour were narrowly defeated by 216 votes to 202. The issue? Energy bills. Except, this time, the Labour Party was demanding that your bills should RISE by £125 a year. Confused? The quarrel yesterday was all about the ‘2030 decarbonisation target’ – a technocratic term, which means in essence a new carbon tax on your utility bills. It would be a tax on everything. A tax on your fridge, your kettle, your oven, your TV, and every light-bulb in your home. If Britain were to commit to this now, it would mean locking in expensive forms of electricity generation over the next 17 years. Labour voted for this to happen, and they nearly won.

The government’s approach to the HS2 debate has changed. Up until recently, government sources would wave away the suggestion that Labour might withdraw its support for the project. They’d point to Andrew Adonis and his influence on Ed Miliband to explain why Ed Balls’s doubts about it didn’t matter that much. But this has now changed. They’ve now decided, in the words of one Number 10 figure, that they need to ‘smoke Labour out on the issue’. Over the next few weeks, we’ll see the Tories trying to put more and more pressure on Labour to say whether or not they’ll back it. Number 10 is acutely aware that, at the moment, Labour’s ambiguous position is simply emboldening opponents of the project, including many Tory MPs.

The good news for the Cameroons on energy is that it looks like they’ll get an agreement by the Autumn Statement to take at least some of the green levies off energy bill. The bad news is that this means that the debate sparked by Ed Miliband’s pledge to freeze energy prices for 20 months if elected is going to continue until, at least, December 4th. An agreement between Cameron and Clegg on energy bills does now appear to be close. The Lib Dem anger at Cameron using PMQs to try and bounce them into a set of concessions has been replaced by a fast-moving negotiation. As one senior Number 10 source says, ‘There’s lots of shouting and public posturing, but 12 hours later Clegg is signalling that he’s prepared to do business.

At PMQs today, the Tories’s energy policy went bi-polar. The Conservatives now seem to touch both extremes of the debate. For eight years they’ve presented themselves as a gang of happy tree-huggers who applaud every green subsidy going. But today David Cameron announced his plan to ‘roll back some of the green regulations and charges’. John Major started it all. Yesterday he lurched back into front-line politics by suggesting that energy companies should pay a windfall tax this winter. Otherwise, he said, the poor will have to choose between starving or freezing to death. Number 10 called this bombshell ‘interesting’. Ed Miliband asked David Cameron if John Major was now a Marxist. ‘Has he been claimed by the red peril?

When Harold Macmillan published The Middle Way in 1938, its title at once entered the political lexicon. As he anticipated, his message that there was an alternative to socialism and political individualism received a frosty reception from right and left. Even the Macmillan family nanny said 'Mr Harold is a dangerous pink'. Yet correctives such as Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom in 1944 did not immediately dampen the impact of Macmillan's philosophy. 'In this illogical island,' Harold Nicolson wrote to Hayek, 'there exists an infinite capacity for finding middle ways'. Sixty years later, concepts such as President Clinton's 'triangulation', Anthony Giddens' 'Third Way' and the first ten years of New Labour showed the durability of the hare that Macmillan set running.

The coalition wants this week to be all about the GDP figures, out on Friday. As I say in the Mail on Sunday, Downing Street is confident that they’ll show the economy is continuing to grow at a relatively decent clip and is already working out how to make political out of that. They have, as Simon Walters reports, already prepared a video mocking Labour’s claims that the coalition’s polices would lead to a million more people on the dole. Ed Miliband’s circle expects that the GDP numbers will again be positive. But they take the view that as long as prices are increasing faster than wages, squeezing voters’ living standards, economic growth won’t mean much politically.

The moment that a Downing Street spokesman recommended wearing a jumper to reduce high energy bills, you knew that two things would happen. As sure as night follows day, the Labour leader spun a line criticising the ‘out of touch government’: Their crime policy used to be ‘hug a hoodie’. Now their energy policy appears to be ‘wear a hoodie’ - @Ed_Miliband — Labour Press Team (@labourpress) October 18, 2013 Then the internet spent Friday afternoon in stitches: Cameron heard about #jumpergate whilst in his car. Pull over!

First Ed Miliband was papped with a teenager holding a ‘bong’ (above). Now the Labour leader is being offered dope on the street by passing fans. According to the Ham & High, little Ed and his team believed that builder Robert Quinn had offered them his ‘last Rolo’ on a walkabout in Camden. In fact, Quinn had offered his ‘last rollie’, referring to a joint. And there was Mr Steerpike thinking that they must be smoking something already.

The Clangers are back. And not just on television. At PMQs, both the party leaders tried to embarrass each other with solecisms, exaggerations – and, yes, clangers – which they’d dropped in the past. Ed Miliband led with the cost of living crisis and said ‘record numbers are now working part-time’. Cameron retaliated with a Miliband prediction from October 2010. ‘The government programme will lead to the disappearance of one million jobs,’ Wrong! A million jobs have been created. Miliband brought up his pet-policy, the energy bill freeze, and accused Cameron of supporting the Big Six fuel giants. A price con, not a price freeze, said Cameron. And why had Miliband not parked our bills in the chiller-cabinet while he was Energy Secretary?

Len McCluskey is doing Conservative HQ’s work for them. The emboldened Unite leader is welcoming the return of socialism under Red Ed. Last night at the annual Jimmy Reid lecture, McCluskey spoke passionately of Miliband’s bold new agenda: ‘Ed Miliband’s speech to the Labour conference was – some would say – the most genuinely radical we have heard from a Labour leader for nigh on 30 years.' He also welcomed the end of New Labour's ‘neo-liberal’ dogma (you know, the policies which resulted in three general election victories). In reference to Ed’s energy policy: ‘that is not just a break with the coalition’s policies, it also represents Labour turning its back on the neo-liberal dogmas which dominated the Blair-Brown years.