Labour party

There are many reasons why Labour conference felt flat this year, and many of them are out of the party's control. It cannot help that its MPs and a number of its delegates are tired after an energetic Scottish campaign. It cannot help that the Scottish campaign saw a level of engagement in politics that cannot be replicated, save by another vote with a clear question and clear implications, and that would always have contrasted badly with the Labour conference. It cannot help that the referendum took place just days before the conference began, and that therefore it was impossible to get the same sort of coverage you'd expect in the run-up to your conference in the press.

No notes speech have been Ed Miliband’s political party trick. His One Nation speech two years ago ended speculation about his leadership and last year’s energy price freeze effort knocked the Tories off their stride for months. But today, the no notes speech hurt Miliband rather than helped him. Without an autocue, Miliband skipped bits of the speech. This has happened to him before, one year he missed out the section on the environment. But this year, Miliband missed out the bits he could least afford to: forgetting the sections on the deficit and immigration.

How does Labour win back the working class voters who've abandoned it? This question, part of the soul searching the party fell into when it lost the 2010 election, has gained even greater currency since the Scottish referendum. This evening Michael Dugher and John Denham had a stab at answering it at a conference fringe. And the answers were really quite unsettling. Denham told the fringe that 'we're talking to people who've come to the conclusion that governments are a bonus if they don't make their lives worse' and therefore just one policy wasn't going to solve it. He said: 'We have to get back into a relationship with people who have good reason to believe politics isn't working for them.

Judging by the reaction in the conference hall, Hilary Benn's speech was the best of this afternoon's session. Several people gave him a standing ovation. His task was rather easier than Ed Miliband's on Marr this morning, because the Shadow Communities and Local Government Secretary could talk about hopey-changey Labour ideas, rather than the nopey-changey Labour opposition to English votes for English laws (EVEL). So Benn focused on the devolution to English cities and regions that Labour has been working on and talking about for months, arguing that it was the true way to respond to the referendum result. He said: 'Our deal is for all parts of England. Conference, this will be the biggest economic decentralisation in a century. But it won't be enough.

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_11_Sept_2014_v4.mp3" title="Fraser Nelson, Tom Holland and Leah McLaren discuss how we can still save the Union" startat=50] Listen [/audioplayer]I bet that until a few days ago you thought the referendum in Scotland was a mildly amusing sideshow. Perhaps you still do. Perhaps you are convinced that the ‘silent majority’ that Better Together are so sure will step up to the plate at the last minute really exist. Perhaps you think that the reasons many people are giving for voting ‘yes’ are so vague that voters will change their mind on the day. Or even if they don’t you might think it is all an irrelevance.

The talks between the Lib Dems and the Conservatives on the anti-terror measures that David Cameron will unveil this afternoon have finally finished. There are a few more details to be thrashed out - crossing of Ts and dotting of Is rather than major policy decisions - but the two parties are basically there. That the talks have only broken up with just over an hour to go until the statement shows how contentious these measures have been in the Coalition. David Cameron's press conference, in which he set out the heightened threat, was partly a softening-up exercise to push the Lib Dems into accepting what the security and intelligence services had told him: that they needed to plug the 'gaps in Britain's armoury'.

One of the most fascinating things about Lord Ashcroft's latest poll is not its content, but who in the Conservative party will be reading it. Naturally, those trying to hold onto or win in the marginal seats that the peer has polled will be very interested (but not cheered) by the findings. But besides those with a personal stake in individual seats, there will be two groups of MPs: those who comb through the full datasets that Ashcroft produces, and those who do not. These are, respectively, the pragmatists and the optimists in the party, and they naturally have quite different views of what will happen next May.