Ed miliband

After Ed Miliband’s buttery overtures to the Lib Dems earlier, a response courtesy of the party president, Tim Farron. It offers, on the surface at least, a vicious rebuke to the Labour leader – and a staunch defence of what the coalition has achieved. Here it is in full: “Labour have just spent 13 years sucking up to Rupert Murdoch and George Bush – why would any sane progressive even give them a second glance? As part of the coalition government, Liberal Democrats have started fixing Labour’s economic mess, taking millions of people out of Income Tax and reforming British politics. Things Labour had 13 years to do but failed

The Liberal Democrats are not like the other two parties. The acitvists still have real power and set the policy agenda of the party. This is what makes Richard Grayson’s intervention in The Observer today so important. Grayson is one of the leading activists on the left of the party. After Nick Clegg’s election as leader. he organised a concerted push by the beard and sandals brigade to take over the powerful party committees and thus check the more economic liberally instincts of the party leadership. So his call for Lib Dem members to start cooperating with Ed MIliband is far more than just a cry of pain. The Federal

As with so many things, the coalition’s great strength is also its great weakness. On the one hand, it is two parties working together, politicians putting aside their differences to cooperate in the national interest. This is something that, broadly speaking, the electorate likes. On the other, it is a government that nobody voted for. There’s a danger that the public come to see coalition as an arrangement that just allows both parties to worm out of their manifesto commitments on the grounds that they didn’t win the election.  The coalition’s national interest case is a strong one. But it needs to be made with greater frequency. It cannot be

At last Wednesday’s PMQs Cameron kicked Ed Miliband into touch with a debonair swagger. Today anger replaced disdain. The PM’s eye-popping rage is so palpable that some commentators take it for vulnerability or even a hint of self-doubt. Milband has Cameron rattled? Nothing of the sort. Cameron just can’t control himself.   Asked about the Coalition’s higher education policy, he heaped rancid abuse on the opposition leader from a lofty perch. He called him “an opportunist,”  who “posed about social mobility” and was guilty of “rank hypocrisy.” “He saw a big crowd in the Mall,” fumed Cameron, referring to the student protests, “and said, ‘I am their leader I must

Today’s Guardian calls it his first interview since leaving office, although I think the Independent beat them to that one back in July. But, in any case, Gordon Brown’s chat with Larry Elliot is another staging post on his slow path back to public life. Here’s my quick summary: 1) Sniping from the moral high ground. A bit late now, but Brown is making a desperate scramble for the moral high ground. Not for him, he says, scurrilous memoirs that sift through the “arguments” of the past. No, he’s got far more important things on his mind than muck-raking and innuendo, like the future of financial regulation across the world.

Phil Woolas has lost his appeal against the election court declaring his victory in Oldham East and Saddleworth. As I understand it, Woolas has not exhausted his legal options and could take the whole matter to judicial review. Word is that no decision will be made on a by-election until it is known whether or not Woolas will appeal.   Interestingly, Woolas was accompanied to court today by John Healey, the shadow Health minister. Healey is extremely popular with his Labour colleagues, he came second in the shadow Cabinet elections, and his decision to stand by Woolas today is a sign of where the emotional energy in the Parliamentary Labour

David Laws has responded to Andrew Adonis’ partisan review (no link apparently) of 22 Days in May. Laws’ account of the formation of the coalition and its infancy in government. Laws denies Adonis’ charge that the Lib Dems had a ‘right-wing agenda’ and, to prove the point, drops a wonderful quotation from Peter Mandelson during a discussion on tax, saying: ‘Haven’t the rich suffered enough already.’ Rather, Laws’ argues that the coalition formed as it did because Labour were simply too divided to be credible. He writes: ‘Labour was too disorganised or divided even to table clear positions on tax, education spending, pensions or the deficit. And, on voting reform,

Ed Miliband has made an inauspicious start to his second political relaunch of the week. The Sun has dubbed him Buzz Lightweight, after he adopted the Pixar-inspired catchphrase ‘Beyond New Labour’ to describe his vision for the party. Miliband’s media presence is already wooden; migrating to plastic is hardly a promotion. Miliband and his elders have arrived at Labour’s national policy forum. In so far as it’s possible to determine what he stands for, Miliband is not aiming for the middle ground of British politics, as David Cameron and Tony Blair did. But he is courting the ‘squeezed middle’ with the promise of change. So far, that promise is more vacuous than profound