Labour party

Class war. It's not very classy, is it? But it's Labour's big thing at the moment, the class-of-politicians-crisis, which it thinks works well with the other crisis facing hardworking families up and down the country that the party likes to talk about, and allows Ed Miliband to duck awkward things like responding to the Budget. He and his henchmen have spent the past week and a half talking as much about Etonians as they have pensioners. On Tuesday, Rachel Reeves had her go, banging on about rich Tories buying Lamborghinis. Ed Balls was the follow-up act on Wednesday (having already had a first shot last week with his jokes about the PM's friend 'Bingo'). He told the Commons that: 'When the hon.

The Commons has just backed the government's welfare cap by 520 votes to 22 against. As that figure for the Noes will include SNP MPs, this means a very small rebellion on the Labour benches - around 13. Party sources were yesterday briefing they expected around two dozen of their backbenchers to vote against. Tory deputy chief whip Greg Hands has already taken the opportunity to tweet the names of those he saw going through the No lobbies in this vote.

So Rachel Reeves confirmed in the Commons today that Labour will back the welfare cap when it comes to a vote. Tory MPs cheered her as she announced this. There is a rebellion brewing on the Labour benches on this, which party sources are saying they remain 'vigilant' about. Some claim that this will be the biggest revolt of Miliband's leadership. If it is, then it will have to surpass the 40 Labour MPs (39 and one teller) who rebelled against their party's official position on welfare sanctions just over a year ago. The then Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary Liam Byrne instructed Labour MPs to abstain on a bill which enabled the DWP to avoid repaying benefits to people sanctioned for refusing to take part in the government's work experience programme.

One of the other things worth noting from this morning's letter from the 'members of the progressive community' who are anxious that Labour isn't attempting to make a big offer in 2015 is that the alliance of groups and figures from the left and right of the party back decentralisation. The letter calls for: 'Devolution of state institutions, by giving away power and resources to our nations, regions, cities, localities and, where possible, directly to the people.' As I explained in my Telegraph column last week, a battle in the shadow cabinet has resulted in a surprise victory for Hilary Benn and Jon Cruddas, who had been pushing for a Labourish sort of localism. We saw some of the outworkings of that in Ed Miliband's Hugo Young lecture.

The Labour party's reaction to today's opinion polls will tell us a great deal about how well Ed Miliband has really invested in his party. If the backbenchers feel they have a stake in the Labour leader, and as though he is worth fighting for - which Conservative MPs have often not felt about Cameron, leading to them airing their dirty laundry in public - then the panic in the party won't break out beyond John Mann's intervention today. The backbencher told Pienaar's Politics that 'of course it's a warning shot and it would be naive to think otherwise. I think the message is that we need to be much clearer and I think simpler in putting across what our alternative is and what we stand for.' Mann said this wasn't just a Miliband problem but also the Shadow Cabinet and the whole party.

English Labour leaders tend to find Scottish party conferences difficult. The Scots tend to be more old-fashioned, unreconstructed and left-wing than their English colleagues which can make it difficult for English party leaders to gauge the mood when they come north. But Ed Miliband actually managed to get through his address to the Scottish Labour Party conference without any major problems this afternoon, primarily because he managed to adapt his One Nation slogan to fit the independence debate. Miliband has been banging on about One Nation for two years now with few people having any idea what he means. But when he refers to the independence debate, the concept suddenly has meaning – and this is what he concentrated on today.

If Ed Balls thought he could have done a better job than Ed Miliband at responding to the Budget, today he got his chance. The debate on the measures announced by George Osborne rumbles on in the House of Commons, and Ed Balls gave his speech on it this afternoon. He started by telling the Chamber that this was 'the Chancellor's last chance to make decisions and announce measures that will make a real difference before the general election'. Balls claimed that 'for all [Osborne's] boasts and complacency, the Budget did nothing to address the central reality that will define his time in office - the fact that for most people in our country, living standards are not rising but are falling year on year'.

Ed Balls has just delivered quite an odd post-Budget briefing. It was odd because he didn't really want to criticise anything. Of course, when the Chancellor has just unexpectedly announced major reforms to the pensions system, it would be foolish for an opposition to start criticising a reform that it probably doesn't quite understand. But the furthest the Shadow Chancellor would go was that it was 'underwhelming'.

And it doesn't matter who you are. Conservative, Labour, Liberal, Nationalist, Green or UKIP it's all the same. The BBC is hopelessly prejudiced against you. As it should be. Why only this morning we see Owen Jones complaining that, contrary to what the Daily Mail would have you believe, the BBC is instinctively biased against the left and Lesley Riddoch suggesting  the corporation is reflexively biased against the very idea, let alone the prospect, of Scottish independence. Well, up to a point. But asking whether the BBC is inclined to the left or right is the wrong question. It is a kind of category error. Adding up the number of (presumed) right-of-centre - or Unionist - journalists or presenters on the BBC and supposing this "proves" anything is a fool's mistake.

George Osborne was on Andrew Marr this morning announcing support for a new garden city at Ebbsfleet in Kent and the extension of Help to Buy on new build homes until 2020. The Tories hope that these policies will show both that they are planning for the long term and that they are supporting aspiration. But what struck me as most significant was Osborne’s response when told by Marr that he was sounding more like a Liberal Democrat than a Conservative. He instantly replied, ‘Conservatives believe in lower taxes, Liberal Democrats want to put taxes up.’ We already know that Osborne believes that the rest of the deficit can be cleared without any more tax increases and this reply suggests that the Tories will run in 2015 as the only party that won’t put up taxes.