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By now, we’re all used to waking up to newspaper columns describing Ed Miliband’s flaws and proclaiming him unfit to lead the Labour party. But today, it’s David Miliband who’s under fire in two articles – one by Roy Hattersley in the Guardian and the other by Matthew Norman in the Telegraph. They’re both in response to the elder Miliband’s New Statesman article, the significance of which Pete wrote about on Thursday.
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Any CoffeeHousers with a taste for schadenfreude should read David Miliband’s article in the New Statesman. We have to move beyond big government, he declares. We need a growth strategy. I’m not sure if any Labour leader has ever argued otherwise: maybe, as Miliband implies, it has found one now. But, as I ask in my Daily Telegraph column today, what’s worse: a party that’s stuck in 1983, or a modernising movement that’s aiming for 1987? But talk to any Tory, and it’s hard to find any who think the 2015 election is in the bag. Four factors should prevent us from writing off Labour’s chances: 1) David Cameron is brilliant, but just not (yet) at winning elections.
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According to Nick Cohen Ed Miliband is Britain's Greatest Leader of the Opposition. Blimey, that's quite a statement. He's a plucky wee chap too: Ed Miliband is a geek, a failure and a loser. All the press says so, so it must be true. Yet the apparent no-hoper retains the ability of the boy who confronted the naked emperor to change the terms of debate. But what debates has he changed? Nick suggests Miliband was brave to stand-up to Rupert Murdoch and that he's been right to lead the way in banker-bashing. Perhaps so. But few people outside Westminster (and parts of north London) actually care very much, if at all, about Rupert Murdoch even if they do deplore (or pretend to deplore) the tabloids. It's not a vote-harvesting issue.
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In a speech tomorrow, Ed Miliband will call for ‘one nation banking’. The Labour leader will argue that banks have to show that they are part of the society in which they operate. But, perhaps, most interesting is Miliband’s point — previewed in the political column this week — that the behaviour and pay structures of banks are fair game for parliament because they are ‘either directly or indirectly supported by the taxpayer.’ Labour will, indeed, propose a vote on the broader bonus culture. The clear target of this motion will be Barclays and Bob Diamond. Before the bailouts it would have been easy to dismiss all this as left-wingery gone mad.
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The most curious thing about David Miliband's article for the latest New Statesman — which is causing quite a stir this morning — is that it should appear now. After all, the Roy Hattersley essay that it purports to be responding to was published, so far as I can tell, last September. That's five months ago. Which is fine, if it's really taken MiliMajor that long to get around to it. But it certainly fuels the idea that he has chosen now, this moment, to make a political intervention — and Hattersley is just an excuse. And the intervention itself? Basically, Miliband warns against what he calls 'Reassurance Labour', a strain within the party that has cosy ideas about a big, centralised state and its capacity to do good.
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Miliband is getting the measure of PMQs. Not with respect to Cameron. With respect to himself. He’s learned that his strongest register — sanctimony — will always ring hollow unless it’s attached to a powerful cause. And his gags don’t work. So he’s ditched his team of funny men and wise-crackers and turned to his political instincts instead. Miliband’s gut worked today. He began with a question which he knew Cameron couldn’t answer. Why hasn’t the government activated the laws requiring banks to name all employees earning over a million year? The PM answered by not answering. He performed a transparent switcheroo from the particular question to the general topic.
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As expected, the Tories did everything they could to make the benefit cap the subject of PMQs. One Tory MP managed to slip in a question on it just before Miliband got up, allowing Cameron to press the Labour leader on the issue even before he had started speaking. Tory MPs kept coming back to the benefit cap — there were five questions on it in all — allowing Cameron to repeatedly mock the Labour front bench for not saying what its position is. ‘Just nod — are you with us or against us?’ was one of the lines Cameron tried to goad them with. But in the main clashes between the two leaders, which were on top pay and the NHS, Miliband actually did pretty well.
From our UK edition
Today’s PMQs will be another skirmish in the battle for fairness. All three parties know that there is no more potent word in British politics at the moment than fairness and they all want to be its champion. But what will make PMQs interesting today is that Cameron and Miliband each have a powerful weapon in the fairness debate, but also a vulnerability. Miliband’s weapon is bankers’ bonuses – the government’s inaction over Stephen Hester’s bonus has given him plenty of material. But he’s acutely vulnerable over the benefits cap. Cameron will be desperate to move the debate onto this territory.
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If you wanted proof that Cameron has softened his stance towards Europe since the hard chill of December, then just look to the Lib Dems. Nick Clegg, unlike then, was sat next to the Prime Minister as he gave his statement to the Commons this afternoon. And the questions that followed from the likes of Menzies Campbell and Simon Hughes were generally warm and approving. Campbell started by, in his words, ‘praising the pragmatism of the PM’. Hughes celebrated a ‘more successful and satisfactory summit than the one in December’. That praise, while friendly enough, creates obvious problems for Cameron — and it was those problems that Ed Miliband sought to exploit in his questions to the PM.
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Ed Miliband is not naturally a eurospectic, but he certainly sounded like one during his appearance on ITV's Daybreak show earlier. ‘I'm very concerned about what David Cameron has done,’ he said in reference to the PM's equivocation over Europe yesterday. ‘He's sold us down the river.’ Whether this is Miliband committing towards the sort of euroscepticism that is being urged on him by some of his colleagues, it's too early to say. It's only words, after all. But my guess is that — just as when Miliband attacked Cameron for not signing up to the latest treaty, but couldn't say whether he'd have signed it himself — this is more him trying to have his cake and eat it.
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Stephen Hester’s decision to waive his bonus, revealed by Robert Peston just after 10 o’clock, will be a source of great relief to David Cameron and George Osborne. A story that could have dragged on for weeks, undermining their argument about fairness has just lost most of its potency. Ed Miliband, though, will be able to claim — with some justification — that it was the threat of a Commons vote on the matter that led to Hester renouncing his bonus. But this isn’t quite the end of this business. There’s now the question of what happens to the bonuses for other members of staff at RBS and then there is next year’s round. There’s also the whole issue of RBS’ status.
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A-ha! Labour have hit on a line on the benefits cap, and Liam Byrne is peddling it in the Daily Telegraph this morning. ‘Now, there are some people who are against this idea altogether,’ he writes, ‘Neither I, nor Ed Miliband are among them.’ The way he sees it, he goes on to explain, is that there should be a cap but it should be set locally, so that it could be higher than £26,000 in more expensive areas such as London, and potentially less in other areas. Bryne adds that there should be an ‘an independent body like the Low Pay Commission to determine the level at which it is set for different area.’ The Times has a useful article (£) by Roland Watson and Michael Savage, tucked away on p.
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Miliband Attacks Cameron Over Chocolate Oranges might win a prize for the headline that best summarises Ed Miliband's stewardship of the Labour party. In case you still can't believe this is the case, let me repeat it: Miliband Attacks Cameron Over Chocolate Oranges. It is so dire, so naff, so excruciatingly hilarious that I thought it had to be a joke. But no, this is the BBC not the Daily Mash. Here's what Brave Sir Miliband told the House magazine: Ed Miliband has attacked David Cameron for failing to stop the sale of cut-price Chocolate Oranges - something the PM complained about in opposition. In 2006, Mr Cameron criticised WH Smith for discounting chocolate rather than fruit despite the UK's obesity crisis.
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Incredible events in the chamber today. An absolute sensation at PMQS. For the first time since last summer, Ed Miliband got through the session without triggering talk of a leadership crisis. There was gloomy news aplenty to dwell on. Debts soaring; growth flat-lining; dole queues snaking back through blighted high streets and bankrupt business parks. The Labour leader chose to wallop Cameron with a well-prepared attack on the NHS. Quoting the prime minister’s vow, ‘to take our nurses and doctors with us’, he asked why the government had stopped listening. The prime minister’s reply was frivolous and desperate. He giggled and smirked like a teenager at the despatch box and tried to make light of his loathed policy.
From our UK edition
Today was one of those PMQs when you sensed that both sides were fairly happy with how it had gone. Ed Miliband turned in one of his stronger performances, cleverly splitting his questions and so allowing himself to have a go at both the economy and the coalition’s troubled NHS reforms. Cameron, for his part, got through what was always going to be a difficult session for him after this morning’s negative growth numbers. Strikingly, there were four planted Tory questions on the benefits cap. The Tories know that Labour’s vote against it compounds one of their biggest vulnerabilities, the sense they are the party for people on benefits and not those in work.
From our UK edition
PMQs 25 January.
From our UK edition
The longer the row over the benefit cap goes on, the better it will be for the Tories. The cap chimes with the public’s sense of fairness. Polls show massive public support for capping benefits at £26,000 a year for non-working households (the cap won’t apply to the disabled or war widows), and if Labour oppose it, they’ll be handing the Tories a stick with which to beat them. Chris Grayling has already declared that tonight’s vote in the Lords is ‘a test of Ed Miliband’s leadership’. Those who argue that the cap isn’t fair because it will force people to move out of their house are missing the point.
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Today’s polls make grim reading for Labour. Even three months ago senior Labour or Tory people wouldn’t have thought that the Tories would be five points ahead at this point in the cycle. Part of Labour’s problem is that its positions require too much explanation. As one Number 10 source jokes, ‘Ed Miliband can do a Rubik's cube in less time than it takes him to explain his position on the cuts.’ A prime example of these overly complicated policy positions is Labour’s approach to the benefit cap. The leadership says that it is in favour of a cap in principle but against this one in practice.
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Perfect for Friday evening is this: the Gordon Brown-themed version of Ko-Ko's ‘little list’ from The Mikado that Jeff Randall wrote for us back in 2007. The chorus should be sung, according to Jeff, by three people who have been quite prominent this week: Ed Miliband, Ed Balls and Yvette Cooper... The clunking fist, Jeff Randall, The Spectator, 3 March 2007 Britain doesn’t do Lord High Executioners, but if it did, Gordon Brown would probably be the best in the world. The prospect of the Chancellor in this role occurred to me while listening again to Gilbert & Sullivan’s masterful satire, The Mikado. Ko-Ko makes his entrance with ‘a little list’ of those who are for the chop. Among the joys of W.S.
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This week's Spectator cover has achieved a rare distinction: it's going to be hung up on the wall chez Ed Balls and Yvette Cooper. Or at least that's what the shadow chancellor told Sky's Jon Craig when quizzed about it earlier. You can see the cover image itself, by Stephen Collins, to the left. And below are a few extracts from the article by Melissa Kite that it illustrates. ‘Can Cooper save the Labour party?’ it asks. ‘Is she Labour's Iron Lady?’ And the answer… well, you'll have to read the full thing for that. In the meantime, here are those extracts to whet your appetite: 1) Office space. ‘In Yvette Cooper’s home, an entire room is given over to memorabilia of her husband’s life in politics.
