Labour party

Gurus are dangerous beasts in politics mainly because they tend to say awkward things (something Ed Miliband, who has Lord Glasman as his on-off guru, can attest to more than others). But the row over Arnie Graf's immigration status, sparked by the Sun's front page today, shows that gurus are dangerous in many, many ways. Like the Church of England discovering it was investing in Wonga while also crusading against it, it's surprising that the Labour party didn't think to make sure all was tickety-boo on the immigration status front before launching a tougher strategy in this area. Still, it has given the Conservative attack machine something to do, with Priti Patel writing to the UK Border Agency to demand an investigation into whether Graf is working here illegally.

Restauranteur Richard Caring is leading the charge against Labour for their pledge to reintroduce the 50p tax rate. The billionaire owner of Caprice Holdings, which includes Le Caprice, The Ivy and Scott’s, said over the weekend: 'I am deflated to see this negative political attack on those trying to support the fragile recovery in these tough economic times.' Awkwardly for Labour, Caring is one of the many rich backers the party were revealed to have tapped up for loans under Blair, and they are still yet to repay him his £2 million. If he’s that upset with Balls, maybe it’s time to send him his bill?

Ed Balls and Ed Miliband have a funny old approach to convincing voters that they should be handed back the keys to the car. They pen pieces about how tough Labour is on welfare spending and make careful (and carefully-worded) references at every opportunity to their promise not to borrow more for day-to-day spending. The Shadow Chancellor prevaricates over HS2 to give the impression that he's fiscally responsible. He did that again today when he appeared on the Andrew Marr Show, but he also said this: 'But do I think the level of public spending going into the crisis was a problem for Britain? No, I don’t, nor our deficit, nor our national debt – what happened was a global financial crisis which pushed up the deficit. The question then was ‘who can get the deficit down?

The overnight briefing of Ed Balls' speech to the Fabian Society's annual conference was that the Shadow Chancellor would make a binding fiscal commitment to balance the books, deliver a surplus on the current budget and get the national debt falling in the next Parliament. Which sounded like a mighty eleventh-hour repentance until you looked at the detail. Ed Miliband has spent the past few months trying to sound like a dry old bean counter by saying Labour wouldn't borrow more for day-to-day spending, which really means Labour won't borrow any more for revenue spending but can splurge all it likes on capital expenditure. And so Ed Balls has done the same today: the 'surplus on the current budget' is the same as 'day-to-day spending': it's the revenue, not the capital budget.

[audioplayer src='http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_23_January_2014_v4.mp3' title='James Forsyth discuss the NHS with Charlotte Leslie MP' startat=1430] Listen [/audioplayer]Pinned to the wall of Jeremy Hunt’s office in the Department of Health is an A1 piece of paper detailing that week’s ‘Never Events’. It catalogues the mistakes that have been made in NHS hospitals that should never have happened: people having the wrong leg amputated, swabs being left inside patients after surgery and the like. This grim list is a rebuke to the glib, Danny Boyle-style rhetoric which dominates all political debate about the NHS and treats any attempt to examine the failings of British health care as heresy.

I have this theory that the reason why the British public is so hugely in favour of cutting welfare to the bone, and the British media so hostile, is that many (maybe most) journalists still depend on financial support from their parents well into their 30s. Since most media folk come from the sort of backgrounds where home ownership is expected, and yet work in an industry where the typical salary makes living anywhere near London extremely difficult, they feel too ashamed to opine on ‘scroungers’ because, well, they are scroungers. Anyway, maybe that’s what’s called projection. Most people in politics, like those in the media, tend to come from fairly privileged backgrounds, and this seems to be the crux of Labour’s counter-attack on welfare.

Ed Miliband tends to enjoy success when he's either stealing someone else's clothes or offering a possibly unworkable policy that sounds catchy. This morning on the Andrew Marr Show he tried both tactics. Having nicked One Nation from the Tories and repeated the phrase so often that they probably don't want it back, Miliband is now trying to ape a Republican president, Theodore Roosevelt. His close colleague Lord Wood sets out why Labour thinks this is a space it can jump into in a piece for Coffee House. listen to ‘Ed Miliband on the Andrew Marr Show’ on Audioboo The catchy line from this Roosevelt-style crusade is that Labour is now the party of competition, with Miliband planning to appoint consumer groups such as Which?

Ed Miliband has spent the past few months celebrating the success of his conference pledge to freeze energy prices. He was so pleased with the disruption that this caused that he referenced it in his speech on banking reform today. He is right to be pleased with that pledge. It was a hit. It's just that today's speech, built up by the Miliband camp as the sequel to the price freeze, was the political equivalent of a difficult second album. You could see what he was trying to do. Sections of the speech were straight from the Obama playbook, just as his conference speech was, with appeals such as 'Britain can do better than this' and lines such as 'we believe we can tip the balance away from struggle and towards hope'. But the playbook lines weren't played very well.

George Osborne’s decision to back an above inflation increase in the national minimum wage is his most politically significant decision since his decision to cut the 50p rate. It also makes that decision far less harmful politically. Reducing the top rate of tax might have been the right thing to do economically but it hurt the Tories politically. It enabled Labour to claim that this was a government for the rich and that the recovery was only benefitting the few. By contrast, this decision allows the Tories to emphasise that, in Osborne’s phrase, this is ‘a recovery for all.’ There will be those on the dry right who don’t like this policy. They’ll argue that it’ll cost jobs.

Is the improving economy harming Labour’s standing? According to a new Guardian/ICM survey out today, Labour is still ahead of the Conservatives by three points — but the gap is slowly shrinking. Since the last ICM poll in December, Labour’s lead has dropped to just three points, down from an eight point lead in November: Today’s poll also looks at how assured people are feeling about their own financial position and their ‘ability to keep up with the cost of living’. 52 per cent now feel confident about the state of their personal finances — the highest level since October 2010.