Labour party

It's the first day back for MPs and even though we are still months, not weeks, away from the General Election, the parties are all already launching themselves down the campaign roller coaster. Ed Miliband is launching his General Election campaign today and the action will start to shift from the now dull and empty House of Commons to seats around the country. Both sides have spent the past few months predicting a dirty and tough campaign, and if today's diary is anything to go by, they'll all be utterly shattered by polling day too, with a tough pace to keep. We have a speech from Ed Miliband, a press conference from a good chunk of the Tories on Cabinet and Nick Clegg's press briefing all before lunchtime. Yet no-one seems to be planning to say anything new.

In 2010, David Cameron stumbled in his first New Year broadcast interview over the Tory plans for a married couple’s tax allowance. This slip-up knocked him and his party off course and was a harbinger of the disastrous Tory campaign to come. Today, there were no such mistakes from Cameron as he appeared on Andrew Marr. Instead, he stuck to his competence versus chaos message and tried, fairly successfully, to avoid making any other news. In this campaign, we will see a more disciplined Cameron than the one who fought the 2010 election. The Tories are this time, in contrast to 2010, certain of what their message should be. One challenge for Tory and Labour alike in the next few months is to avoid getting drawn into hung parliament speculation.

Almost exactly five years ago, the Conservatives fired the starting gun for a general election — and shot themselves in the foot. ‘We can’t go on like this,’ said the poster, next to a picture of an airbrushed David Cameron. ‘I’ll cut the deficit, not the NHS.’ What on earth did it mean? No one seemed sure. As early as January 2010, it was horribly clear: here was a muddled party, preparing to fight an election campaign with a muddled message. Little wonder it ended in a muddled election result. This time, it should be different. The Tories have a professional, Lynton Crosby, running their campaign. He should be able to point out the basics: a clear message is required, and it needs to be repeated.

Politicians really are quite unfortunate people, aren’t they? Always being misinterpreted. It’s almost as though they speak another language (some Commons debates suggest they do, anyway) and journalists wilfully translate them wrongly. Today Tony Blair has claimed that his remarks about a lefty Labour party losing to a right-wing party have been ‘misinterpreted’. This is what he told the Economist: - There could be an election ‘in which a traditional left-wing party competes with a traditional right-wing party, with the traditional result’ and when asked if that means a Tory win, ‘Yes, that is what happens’. - ‘I am convinced the Labour Party succeeds best when it is in the centre ground.

How has Labour managed to make such a mess of its response to the leak of a document on dealing with Ukip that came out on Monday that it's still having to talk about it on Friday? I've been baffled by the poor crisis comms this week - until I heard Lucy Powell, vice-chair of the party's General Election campaign, trying to field questions on it today on the Daily Politics. Her tactics were to tell the interviewer that the origins of the report were 'irrelevant', an old but useless tactic of spinners that generally encourages the journalist to think the story even more relevant than they did when they started the interview.

How much of a threat is Ukip to Labour? The tanks of the people’s army have been on the Conservatives’ lawn for some time but we now have an idea why Labour has been preparing to fight the kippers on the doorstep. Lord Ashcroft has carried out his final round of marginal seats polling this year, focusing on eight seats where the Conservative majority is between 7.1 and 8.1 per cent — plus another four seats where Ukip are threatening Labour. The results aren’t too bad for the Conservatives: out of the seven seats polled on Labour’s target list, they are ahead in just two of them (Ealing Central & Acton and Stevenage).

Today’s Guardian long-read on the Scottish referendum is a great piece of journalism. Both Alistair Darling and Danny Alexander argue in it that when David Cameron stepped out of Downing Street and announced his support for English votes for English laws he allowed the SNP to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, to argue that Scottish voters had been hoodwinked.   Now, to be sure, Alex Salmond make much of Cameron’s announcement. In his Spectator interview he says that it showed that Cameron thinks Scots ‘heads zipped up the back’ and that he didn’t get the enormity of what had just happened.

David Cameron is talking about the ‘great, black, ominous cloud’ that Labour’s economic plans would put over the British economy. Labour is talking about its immigration policies while trying not to talk about a document that suggests it shouldn’t talk for too long about them. The Lib Dems are complaining that the Tories would damage children’s futures. It’s beginning to feel a lot like a general election, even though we’re still quite a way away from it. This is one of the benefits for political parties of the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act that is sucking all the life out of Parliament itself. They are now permanently on the campaign trail, even when they’re at Prime Minister’s Questions.

Jim Murphy has been elected leader of the Scottish Labour party. He defeated his more left wing rival Neil Findlay with 55.59 per cent of the vote to Findlay's 34.99 per cent. Kezia Dugdale was elected deputy leader. Murphy is a far more formidable politician than his predecessor, Johann Lamont. But he faces a mighty task. A YouGov poll of Scotland ahead of the UK general election, published this morning, finds the SNP on 47% with Labour 20 points behind. If repeated at the election in May, and assuming a uniform swing, this would see Labour lose 34 of the 41 Scottish seats that it won in 2010.    However, Murphy has energy and no fear of the SNP, both qualities that Scottish Labour has been lacking in recent times.

Unfortunately for Labour, it cannot dismiss Nigel Farage as a ‘pound shop Enoch Powell’ quite so easily as Russell Brand did last night. The party knows that Ukip can take the voters that have already deserted it - voters that it thought still belonged to the party - and there have been increasing calls for the Labour leadership to take Ukip seriously. I understand that MPs have been receiving a series of briefings at the party’s HQ recently examining voters who are vulnerable to Ukip. The briefings, which have been produced by a number of party figures including John Healey, who has long worried about the Ukip threat, include details of the demographic of voters in each Labour constituency who are susceptible to voting for Nigel Farage’s party.

Ed Miliband’s speech on reducing the deficit has attracted a fair bit of criticism for not telling us very much that’s new. It was supposed to be a Big Speech, and Big Speech normally means Big Announcement, but there wasn’t one. There wasn’t even really any bigger attempt to tell us what Labour would do after the General Election. The Labour leader spent a fair chunk of the question-and-answer session afterwards telling the audience that he had been ‘clear’, which is what politicians end up having to say when they haven’t been clear, often deliberately. But it’s unfair to say that this was a useless speech as it did articulate better than previously the Labour leader’s basic vision for the economy.