Ed miliband

Ed Miliband was doing the interview rounds today, and CoffeeHouses may be interested in the below – an edited version of his exchange with Nicky Campbell on Five Live. NC: Is the problem union power?  MPs and the constituencies clearly voted for your brother, Alan Johnson’s favourite candidate.  He was a clear winner in those two parts of the party, and many people say union influence has to be limited.  Now this is a real test of your guts, isn’t it?  Is it the right thing to do? EM: I see it a different way, Nicky, to be honest.  I see that politics as a whole, in every party, is

There is talk of Ed Miliband’s ‘New Generation’, but no indication of what it stands for. It has no clear views on the economy, student finance, defence and electoral reform. Despite his party’s lead in the polls, Ed Miliband is an inert political entity (and it did not help him that the party peaked in his absence). Tim Montgomerie has rightly diagnosed a leadership vacuum. Miliband is timid before a parliamentary party that did not select him, and is struggling to acclimatise to a political discourse that the coalition government is moving beyond the terse liturgy of left and right. So far, Miliband’s banal default tactic has been to seek

Patronage remains a strong statement of leadership, and an indication of a leader’s competence. As James noted yesterday, Ed Miliband chose the occasion to play one of his few picture cards: Maurice Glassman’s accession into red ermine is a major PR coup for Labour in the battle to be ‘progressive’ and community-focused. But Miliband’s list is also noteworthy for those it excluded. The Times has the details (£): ‘He decided against handing seats in the House of Lords to Nigel Doughty and Sir Ronald Cohen — who have given more than £6 million to the party since 2005 — as well as Jon Mendelsohn, Labour’s fundraising chief. All three had

Today’s peerage list contains more interesting names than usual. Jullian Fellowes — Downton Abbey, Gosford Park, Snobs — is the one who will get the most attention. It is a sign of how confident David Cameron is feeling that he has risked the reopening of the whole class question. But perhaps, the most intriguing Tory appointment is Patience Wheatcroft. One imagines that she wouldn’t have taken the role unless it was a way to allow her to serve on the political front line. Howard Flight’s appointment to the Lords rights a wrong: his sacking as a candidate before the 2005 election was as unfair as it was hasty. A few

Today’s press will not have made happy reading for Ed Miliband and his supporters. Alan Johnson’s comments to The Times about the need to change the way Labour elects its leader has revived the debate about the legitimacy of Ed Miliband’s victory. Meanwhile in the New Statesman there’s a piece setting out the internal tensions within the party. Intriguingly, Lisa Tremble, who was David Miliband’s press chief during his leadership campaign, has put what could be considered a rather provocative quote on the record. She tells the magazine, ‘David’s rediscovered his excitement in politics…He’s looking forward to the new challenges. He’s not going anywhere.’ As I say in the new

Oh, how Labour enjoy misleading the public about their record on the public finances. Ed Miliband did it a couple of weeks ago, with some very loose rhetoric about how the previous government had “paid down the debt”. And now Alan Johnson’s at it, with a fiery speech at the RSA which reheated many of the themes in his recent New Statesman article. The passage that struck me was this: “In 2007/08 as the crisis hit, we have the second lowest debt level in the G7 reduced by 14 percent in the 10 years we’d been in office… …The year before the crisis hit we were borrowing 2.4 percent of

This Phil Woolas business is fast becoming a rather large problem for Ed Miliband. Those Labour MPs who are organising a fighting fund for Woolas are effectively defying the party leadership. Remarkably, he is on course to raise £50,000 by Friday. There is a whole slew of explanations for why Labour MPs are, to borrow a phrase, standing by Phil. First of all, the idea of judges overturning election results isn’t popular. Second, he’s a well-liked and sociable colleague, and no one who has fought a Lib Dem has much sympathy with their complaints about dirty tactics. But after these explanations, we move into more murky territory. There is still

Congratulations to the Labour leader and his partner on the birth of their second son. Miliband will now take two weeks of paternity leave, during which time Harriet Harman will step into his brogues, etc. Here’s the official statement: “Ed and Justine are overjoyed at the birth of their second child and can’t wait to introduce the new arrival to his big brother, Daniel. Both are keen to pass on their thanks to the NHS staff at the hospital.”

The question at the bottom of this shoddy leaflet must surely join John Rentoul’s famous list. Who on earth will stand by the egregious Phil Woolas now? As with the Tower Hamlets debacle, Ed Miliband is taking eons to make a straight forward statement: the Labour leadership condemns the actions of Phil Woolas and hopes that he will not be selected to stand again. George Eaton gives a reason for Miliband’s reticence: in a colossal error of judgement, Miliband selected Woolas as a shadow Home Office minister, reward no doubt for his deft expertise in race relations. The Oldham East by-election is a test for the coalition, but it is

Alan Johnson has been more comic than cutting during his spell as shadow chancellor. It’s not so much that he’s doing a bad job, but rather that he’s taken a singular approach to the biggest political issue of the day. Where Labour MPs have wanted moral outrage, he has delivered easy quips. Where the public might expect self-confidence, he has chosen self-deprecation. It may be charming, but the question is: does it win votes? Which is why it’s intriguing to see Johnson change course today, via a surprisingly spiky article in the New Statesman. There is, so far as I can tell, not one intentional gag in the entire piece

“Remember, our government paid down the debt before the crisis hit.” That’s what Ed Miliband said in a speech last Friday, and I took exception to it at the time. My point was, admittedly, quite blunt: how could the Labour leader make such a claim when debt was around £500 billion in 2006, and rising? So I’m glad that the excellent Full Fact blog has since looked into the matter, and come down broadly on my side – giving Miliband a 2-out-of-5 rating on their truth scale. But some of their wider points are worth developing, which is why I’m returning to the topic now. First, though, the observation that