Labour party

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_27_February_2014_v4.mp3" title="Ed West discusses political bias in the church" startat=640] Listen [/audioplayer]I am training for ordained ministry at a Church of England theological college. I am a trainee vicar, if you will. I am also a Conservative, which puts me in an extremely small minority and quite a tricky position. At my college, there are approximately 60 ordinands in full-time residential training. Of those 60, there are no more than three or four who would describe themselves as Conservative and the overwhelming majority would call themselves (proudly) socialist. There is also a sizable minority of Marxists.

Go to war with the Daily Mail at your peril: Ed Miliband did it over its 'the man who hated Britain' column and now perhaps the Labour party is seeing the revenge for that with the paper's ongoing insistence that Harriet Harman apologise for the National Council for Civil Liberties' links to the Paedophile Information Exchange in the 1970s. Harman, though, is going to war with the Mail again, and her supporters in the press are arguing that the paper is on thin moral ground here. Harman's messy handling of the story has kept it going as much as anything else. She gave a forceful interview to Newsnight yesterday in which she insisted that she had nothing to apologise for, then 12 hours later suggested that the links between NCCL and PIE were 'regrettable'.

A rite of passage for any Opposition leader these days is to promise to make politics more decent and connected to people's lives. One recent Opposition leader said this, for example: 'And we need to change, and we will change, the way we behave. I'm fed up with the Punch and Judy politics of Westminster, the name calling, backbiting, point scoring, finger pointing.' David Cameron, who said this in his leadership acceptance speech in 2005, now has a team of MPs who help heckle Labour in the Commons during Prime Minister's Questions. This was mainly in response to Labour being much better at heckling, with Ed Balls gesticulating and sledging away on the front bench, and Michael Dugher and Sadiq Khan doing similar dirty work on the steps on the Labour side of the house.

It seems the launch of the new Liberal Democrat website is not going very well. Apparently the party of tuition fees and Nick Clegg is 'untrusted'. 'What should you do?', it asks. Lib Dem HQ will be hoping most people do not click 'Get me out of here!' come 2015. With their recent overtures to Labour, those that do vote yellow should certainly 'understand the risks'.

Ed Miliband has been singing the praises of New Towns in tonight's Standard, saying a Labour government would use these developments to help solve London's housing crisis. He writes: 'A key plank will be creating new towns in sustainable locations where people want to live, just like earlier generations did in places such as Stevenage and Milton Keynes. Labour will kick-start the next generation of new towns and garden cities around the capital to ease the pressure on London.' Although he doesn't say it, it's a reasonably safe bet that the Labour leader is thinking of Ebbsfleet when he talks about a sustainable location where people want to live. That's where Lord Adonis, who is leading Labour's growth review, has set his sights for a new development.

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_6_February_2014_v4.mp3" title="James Forsyth and Marcus Roberts discuss Labour's election strategy" startat=702] Listen [/audioplayer]At the end of last year, there was an expectation that Labour’s internal reforms would be one of the big themes of the first quarter of the year. But this week, Labour’s National Executive Committee voted through the changes by the comfortable margin of 28 to 2 and with remarkably little dissent. The absence of a public row over the issue makes it tempting to think that the changes don’t amount to much. But this would be wrong. Labour is going to scrap its current electoral-college split between MPs, the Unions and members and replace it with a one member one vote system.

The Labour party's National Executive Committee has backed Ed Miliband's plans to change the party's trade union links by 28 votes to two, which marks a resounding victory for the Labour leader. There was little doubt that the NEC would endorse the reforms, which will still take five years to be implemented, and in the end the two members who opposed the proposals (another member abstained) were vocal leftwing backbencher Dennis Skinner and Christine Shawcroft. The next step is for the party to vote on the reforms at a special conference on 1 March. Miliband said this afternoon: 'Some people will find change difficult to accept. Others are worried about the consequences.

In another twist of this Raab rebellion, Labour have just announced that they're voting against the amendment on deportation of foreign prisoners. There had been a moment where they would abstain, but now the party has decided that as the government itself as said it is illegal and would be counterproductive, it cannot do anything other than vote it down. The party says it will come forward with proposals in the progress of the bill to facilitate and not hinder the removal of foreign prisoners. A Labour source tells me: 'Weak and chaotic from the Prime Minister and Home Secretary on this so-called flagship bill.' But this is interesting, because former Home Secretary David Blunkett was a co-signatory of the motion (he has since removed it because he is out of London today).