Labour party

The public still doesn’t trust Labour and Ed Miliband on immigration. His speech last year — admitting 'the last Labour government made mistakes’ — was aimed to draw a line under the past and start afresh. How helpful for him to have two key figures of the New Labour era popping up again to remind Britain of where Labour went wrong. First, David Blunkett told the BBC yesterday that an influx of Roma migrants could potentially lead to riots, akin to Oldham and Bradford in 2001: ‘We have got to change the behaviour and the culture of the incoming Roma community – because there’s going to be an explosion otherwise…if everything exploded, if things went wrong, the community would obviously be devastated.

David Cameron’s speech at the Lord Mayor’s banquet yesterday evening rehearsed some basic political arguments that will be honed between now and 2015. Cameron made a decent assault on Labour over the cost of living: ‘There are some people who seem to think that the way you reduce the cost of living in this country is for the state to spend more and more taxpayers’ money....At a time when family budgets are tight, it is really worth remembering that this spending comes out of the pockets of the same taxpayers whose living standards we want to see improve.’ The logical corollary of that statement is pretty obvious: smaller government and tax cuts are the solution to the cost of living crisis.

It is great to be here in Battersea with you today. Last Friday, I was in my constituency, at the local Citizens Advice Bureau. And I talked to some people who had been preyed upon by payday lenders. There was a woman there in floods of tears. She was in work. But she took out a payday loan for her deposit so she could rent somewhere to live. And then disaster followed. A payday loan of a few hundred pounds became a debt of thousands of pounds. She still faces bullying, harassment and threats from multiple payday lenders. Like the young mum I met who described sitting at home with her daughter and seeing an advert on the TV for a payday lender. She said she was down to the last nappy for her baby. She took out the payday loan.

Will Ed Miliband's pledge on the Living Wage, made in today's Independent on Sunday, work? Actually, that's not really the most important question: the experience of the weeks following the autumn conference season is that you don't actually need a workable pledge to be able to set the terms of debate. The Labour leader's plan is for private and public sector employers to receive a tax rebate - on average £445, but up to £1,000 - for 12 months for every employee whose pay is lifted to living wage level of £7.45 an hour. He says this will be paid directly through increased tax and national insurance receipts. The big question now is how the Conservatives respond to this.

One of the odd things about the polls at the moment is that the Tories lead on economic competence and leadership, traditionally the two most important issues, yet trail overall. There are, I argue in the column this week, three possible explanations for this polling paradox. The first possibility is that Ed Miliband is right, that the link between GDP growth and voters’ living standards is broken. A consequence of this is that voters put less emphasis on economic management in the round. Instead, they want to know which party will do most to help them with their cost of living. Then, there’s the possibility that the traditional political rules don’t apply in this era of coalitions and four party politics in England.

It was quite strange yesterday that Michael Gove's allies were quite so happy to concede ahead of his first proper scrap with Tristram Hunt that it was going to be a tough fight. They'd never given Stephen Twigg quite so much credit, although the complications of the Al-Madinah free school row and Nick Clegg's wibbling and wobbling over qualified teachers have made life a little more difficult for team Gove. But the strategy was partly to add to the expectations on the new Shadow Education Secretary, and then to bring them crashing down when he actually appeared.

Yesterday marked the first reasonably good day that agitators for HS2 have had in a while. Northern business leaders started the day with a call to David Cameron to hold firm on the project, followed by Labour leader of Birmingham City Council Sir Albert Bore warning Labour of 'protracted public conflict' in the run-up to the general election if it continued to 'put out such a negative message on HS2'. This morning's Guardian story that Labour will support HS2 provided the project's chairman Sir David Higgins is given the power to bring down its costs appears to be damage limitation. But party sources are today rowing back from that line, which means Labour's support or otherwise is no clearer than it was yesterday.

Former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw was on today’s Daily Politics, gushing with pride that his son Will is Labour’s prospective parliamentary candidate for the seat of Rossendale and Darwen in Lancashire. Yet it seems that this piece of dynastic info was news to Auntie. Will Straw was on the BBC News Channel this morning, discussing energy prices, and there was no mention of his being a PPC. The presenter simply said, ‘Will Straw is Associate Director of the centre-left think tank the Institute for Public Policy Research.’ Mr S would have forgiven the presenter had he not asked: ‘the Labour Party is talking about a freeze on energy prices for two years. Would you go along with that?

Tristram Hunt is on a crusade — to find Labour an education strategy. In today’s Daily Mirror, the new shadow education secretary takes a punt by offering up some fresh ideas, including a pledge to bring back the Education Maintenance Allowance for 16 to 19 year olds in further education. When it was canned in 2011, the EMA scheme had an annual budget of £560 million so how would Labour fund its return? By cutting back winter fuel allowance from rich pensioners: ‘Mr Hunt also wants to bring back the Education Maintenance Allowance to help teenagers from the poorest backgrounds stay in education. This could be paid for by stripping the wealthiest pensioners of the winter fuel allowance.

It is a shame that we will be losing Jack Straw at the next election. He has just announced his attention to stand down from a seat he has occupied for more than 30 years. I always rather liked him. He seemed – you know – sort of human, and his instincts were usually right, certainly over Iraq, even if he did cave in. So, we might add, did the majority of the country cave, at the time, under that welter of disinformation. He was misled as everybody was. He once came into the Today prog when I was still editor and, in the Green Room, I mentioned to him a disadvantageous story which had just broken and which we intended to ask him about. 'Yeah fine,' he replied, 'I shall respond with meaningless career-enhancing waffle.' And so he did.