Ed miliband

Curiouser and curiouser. We in Coffee House have been saying for some time now that – whatever Mervyn King thinks – Britain has the worst inflation in the Western World apart from Greece. An OECD report out today shows we’ve got it worse than most eastern countries too. Korea, Turkey and Estonia are the only eastern nations with higher inflation: But what strikes me most about today is that food prices are soaring here, to an extent far worse than the rest of the world. This is what voters notice most: putting food on the table is very expensive. As Micawber might put it: annual food price inflation 6.3 per

Ah, there it is, in the final sentence of the fourth paragraph: a flattering reference to Ed Miliband. Phew. Good job David Miliband squeezed his brother’s name into his article on Labour’s future (£) for the Times today, otherwise it might have been July 2008 all over again. As it is, MiliD’s third newspaper article in as many days is enough to suggest that he’s keen to remain a prominent figure, if not yet an actual rival for his brother’s crown. In some respects, though, the recommendations made by MiliD are a challenge to his brother’s Way of Doing Things. His suggestion that the left be “an ally of wealth

Eric Pickles is no longer a genial giant. His speech to the Conservative Spring Forum was the rallying cry that many Conservatives in local government, some of whom will be scrapping for survival in May’s elections, have waited to hear.   ‘Ed Miliband,’ Pickles said, ‘is weaker than Neil Kinnock.’ The Labour leader could not take on his unions and militant councils, the Communities Secretaries said before turning an example: ‘Take Labour-run Camden. Ed Miliband’s local council. His councillors are cutting the Surma Community Centre, coincidentally visited by Samantha Cameron. Yet the council has spent twice as much on its town hall newspaper. His councillors are now cutting back tax

George Osborne’s budget, due in two weeks’ time, will be billed as an agenda for growth. This is welcome, but a year late. The burning agenda now is the cost of living. It was our cover story for The Spectator last October: why fret about mild 1 percent-a-year cuts, we asked, when the real killer will be prices? Petrol at 130p a litre is only the most visible sign of this. Other horrors confront shoppers in the supermarket – salmon fillets up by a third, potatoes and butter by a quarter. When Alan Duncan speculated that petrol could hit 200p, he was on the right scent. While the BBC is

George Osborne’s speech to the Tory spring conference today showed the classic left-right way in which he wants to frame the political debate about the economy ahead of the Budget on the 23rd of March.  In a move straight out of the election-winning centre-right playbook of the 80s, he attacked Balls and Miliband as “Two left-wing politicians who don’t understand anyone who wants to get up and get on, anyone who want a better life for their family, anyone who want to create wealth, and start a business, and create jobs, and leave something to their children.” He tried to portray the Conservatives as the antithesis of this, as the

It was Monty Python without the jokes. The focus of PMQs today veered surreally between crisis in north Africa and early swimming pool closures in Leeds. The session opened in Security Council mode with Ed Miliband politely asking the PM to brief us on the humanitarian disaster evolving in Libya’s border-zone. Cameron went into his statesman-of-the-year routine and announced that HMS York had docked in Benghazi with medical supplies.   At such moments the imperial ghosts of the Commons seem momentarily reawakened. Ed Miliband sounds like some Victorian stooge asking the Foreign Secretary to reassure the nation that an uprising in a far-flung oriental possession is being energetically suppressed. Having

Attack, attack, attack. That’s the temper of George Osborne’s article for the Guardian this morning, which sets about Labour’s economic credibility with a ferocious sort of glee. Perhaps the best passage is where he asks how many times Labour can spend their ubiquitous “bank tax,” but this is more pertinent to the recent debate: “Where does all this leave Ed Miliband’s newfound enthusiasm for the “squeezed middle”? Let’s pass over his failure in every interview to define it – his last effort included around 90% of taxpayers. Where we can all agree is that these are difficult times for family incomes. There are two root causes. One is global: rises

As an independent creature, the Resolution Foundation’s new Commission on Living Standards isn’t doing Ed Miliband’s work for him. But, boy, must the Labour leader be glad that they exist. At their launch event this morning, the “squeezed middle” – aka low-to-middle earners – suddenly took shape. There were graphs, such as those in James Plunkett’s post for us earlier, setting out the very real problems facing a segment of British society. And there were even definitions explaining what that segment is: 11 million adults, by the Resolution Foundation’s count, too rich to benefit from measures for the least well-off, and too poor to be entirely comfortable. This was a

Ed Balls has been warming up to this one for a while, and now it has finally come: an all-out attack over rising prices. In an interview with the Sunday Times (£), the shadow chancellor warns of Britain’s “cost of living crisis,” and demands that George Osborne reverse the VAT increase. Much of his pleading is made on behalf of motorists, who – as I pointed out a couple of days ago – face punishment at the petrol pumps. He doesn’t even mention spending cuts once, especially not where his own party’s are concerned. Rising costs, clearly, are the new weapon of choice. And it’s not just Balls. Ed Miliband

The Kindly Pussycat has returned to the fray with a revised version of his memoirs. The FT’s Jim Pickard has highlighted an arresting passage about Ed Miliband’s decision to execute New Labour. ‘When Ed pronounced New Labour ‘dead’, he was not only being more categorical than was wise, but quite possibly more than he really intended. (xxi) …Even allowing for the tactical choices he had made in his bid to become leader, however, I was struck by the fact that he had given no strong clue during the campaign as to what alternative to New Labour he envisaged. He was quick to say what he was against: essentially, Tory policies

“Now he and his leader know what it’s like to be people’s second choice,” trilled George Osborne during his recent encounter with Ed Balls over the dispatch box. But might Balls actually have been Miliband’s third choice for the shadow chancellorship? That’s the implication of a delicious little story in today’s Sun, which claims that Miliband first “tapped up” his brother, aka MiliD, when trying to replace Alan Johnson: “A Labour insider revealed: ‘Ed’s people were desperate not to give the job to Balls.’ However, Ed stopped short of offering his brother the job when David made it clear he wanted to stay on the backbenches.” If true, then it’s

Given that David Cameron will have a tougher fight than perhaps any postwar Prime Minister other than Thatcher, it’s a bit unfortunate that his team doesn’t like political combat. Losing to Rachel Johnson over forests last week exposed major weaknesses, and sent a message to the government’s enemies: that these guys have pretty poor political combat skills. Now word is out, the cuts protests in Liverpool today will be the first in a series of challenges. Cameron, too, is stung by the avoidable mistakes of the last few weeks – and is reshaping No.10 to account for them. Some changes are great, some less so, others downright worrying. Here’s my

Too much time at the barbers. That’s the opposition’s problem. Ed Miliband showed up at PMQS today after a long morning lounging in the chair having his hair coiffed and burnished. His darkly gleaming scalp now looks like the kind of thing toffs scrape their boots on after a morning’s shooting. And that’s precisely what the Prime Minister proceeded to do with him today. With no time for a strategy meeting beforehand Ed had just grabbed a list questions from the last PMQs-but-three.   He began by having a go at Cameron on youth unemployment. But we know how Cameron deals with that one. Been a problem for decades, old