Labour party

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.

Today’s conclusion from the British Election Study that Ukip will hurt the Tories far more than it will damage Labour at the General Election is unsurprising, but still important as its warning that the Conservative party could lose nearly two million voters to Nigel Farage’s party underlines the need for the Tories to find a decent solution to Ukip. Thus far the Tories have tended to capitulate to Ukip on policies, with Nigel Farage becoming a think tank for policy development by applying pressure on nervous MPs who eventually secure concessions from David Cameron in the form of policies he didn’t really want to announce.

Most people went into Work and Pensions Questions expecting Iain Duncan Smith to be in a tetchy fame of mind following this morning’s report on food banks. As a matter of fact, the Work and Pensions Secretary was very, very keen to tell us as often as he possibly could how ‘seriously’ he was taking that report. And the Opposition, which claims to care a lot more about these matters, completely failed to make productive use of its time grilling him. Some Tory ministers were worried that an impending Labour reshuffle at some point this term might see Rachel Reeves moved on to their patch, as she’s deemed very good in the Chamber.

A lot of political types are very cross with the ‘biased media’ today. Ukip is currently the most aerated because some journalists ‘fabricated’ (which is today synonymous with ‘transcribed’) some remarks Nigel Farage made about whether or not restaurants are right to tell women to put napkins over themselves when breastfeeding. Number 10 is very angry with the BBC’s Norman Smith because he talked about the Road to Wigan Pier which is not an OK way of describing the public spending cuts still to come (but the IFS describing them as ‘grotesque’ and ‘colossal’ apparently is). Labour has been annoyed for months that journalists keep pointing out mistakes that Ed Miliband makes.

Labour has had a poor run of Autumn Statement and Budget responses for a couple of years now, and with only today’s statement and the 2015 Budget to go before the General Election, the stakes were pretty high for Ed Balls. The Tories had clearly turned up expecting him to do a terrible job, and their heckling club (which you can read more about here) was out in force. The Shadow Chancellor stood up to a wall of noise. Tory backbenchers had arranged a number of words to shout at him before entering the Chamber. I understand that one of them was ‘apologise’, which they’ve used before on Balls. It was so bad that Speaker Bercow had to tell them off before the frontbencher had even started speaking.

Is it acceptable for writers to sport their political allegiances publicly? In more sensible times you'd hardly need to consider the question since its answer would ordinarily be so bleedin' obvious. These, of course, are neither sensible nor ordinary times. So it is with the fauxtroversy over whether or not it is acceptable - or, worse, appropriate - for Liz Lochhead to have joined the SNP.  This is a real thing, it seems and yet another example of how politics corrupts most things it touches. Lochhead, you see, is not just a poet she is Scotland's Makar (or poet laureate) and therefore, god help us, it's all very different. For some reason.