Labour party

How does the Labour party recover? Harriet Harman set out how it will try to come back from its latest election defeat in a speech this morning which told the party to listen to the customer because the customer is always right. Her basic pitch was that just like a product or a shop or a magazine, it’s more important to work out what people want to buy, rather than what you want to sell or write because your own tastes might not be particularly representative of the market that’s out there. To that end, she told the audience that ‘as we conduct this debate, as we elect our leader

Andy Burnham may be the trade unions’ favourite candidate for Labour leader but he is already distancing himself from some of Ed Miliband’s worst populist nonsense. This is what he said in today’s Observer: ‘We have got to get away from things that look like symbolism. I am going to put the mansion tax in that category. I am not saying it was necessarily completely the wrong thing to do, but in its name I think it spoke to something that the public don’t particularly like, which is the politics of envy.’ In a 1911 article entitled An Unenvious People, The Spectator paid tribute to the nature of Englishmen. The

Jim Murphy is quitting Scottish Labour. After only narrowly surviving a vote of no confidence from the party’s executive this morning, Murphy announced that after a ‘terrible election defeat’, he will still tender his resignation in a month’s time. As well as acknowledging Scottish Labour’s terrible performance in the general election, Murphy opened both barrels at Len McCluskey and Unite the Union, who he blames for some of the party’s troubles in Scotland: ‘I know in the past few days, I’ve been at the centre of a campaign by the London leadership of Unite the Union and they’re blaming myself for myself and the Scottish Labour party for the defeat

With Chuka Umunna out, the choice for Labour party members is simple. If they want to win the next election they will choose Liz Kendall as their next leader. There is a very simple test for suitability for the job: their reply to the question ‘did the last Labour government spend too much money?’ Kendall is the only one who has passed. On yesterday’s Newsnight she was straightforward: yes, Labour did spend too much. Yvette Cooper, by contrast, said on Radio 4 this morning: ‘I think there were things that we were spending wrongly on, there were issues that we would have been spending money, too much money on –

The Labour party has decided on a medium-length campaign to elect its new leader, the Press Association reports, with the announcement on 12 September. This is slightly odd, given NEC members were still on their way to the meeting where they’ll vote on the timetable, but there you go. If that date is approved, it is a halfway house between the short campaign that some were arguing would stop the party from descending into lengthy navel-gazing while the Tories got away with introducing policies that weren’t properly scrutinised by the Opposition, and the long campaign that the unions wanted so they could sign up more members – and that some of